Kachru’s concentric circle includes my country Nigeria as part of the outer circle where English is spoken only because of historical contingency. This is true. Along with India, Philipines and a host of other nations of the world, English is spoken in Nigeria as a result of colonization. This took place in the 1800s and ended in the 1960s. The inner circle countries where English is spoken as a first and only language is the UK, the US, Austrailia, Ireland, New Zealand, etc. People who live in those countries are called native speakers of English perhaps because that is the only language they speak.

The idea of a “native” language however presents an interesting question to my curious mind. Is a language native to those who speak it only because it is the only language they speak or because they speak it with such total and infallible competence? Going by the name, a language is native to those who speak it as their own perhaps only language. I am a native speaker of Yoruba. It is not my only language, but I speak it since birth and have a native-like competence over it. I can teach it. I know the rules of speaking a behaving in the language without any more prompting. I have acquired the language without knowing it. Yes.

The same, however, applies to English for me. I have acquired it from birth, subconsciously and simultaneously with Yoruba so much so that I can’t tell apart which one of them I speak more frequently. I think/dream in either. I have Caucasian  friends who have learnt the Yoruba language almost to the point of native-like proficiency. If they were born in Nigeria, they probably would speak it just like me. They would be native speakers – like thousands of people in the carribbeans whose only language is English (and a creole). So two weeks ago, I asked on Facebook if I would be considered a native speaker of English – for the purpose of applying for a job in the US, and the majority of the responses was “no”. The consideration was that since I speak another language from birth, I cannot be considered a native speaker. Besides, Kachru has put me in the outer rather than the inner circle.

I believe that native speaker language stipulation falls flat when defined only by place or circumstance of birth rather than levels of proficiency. As output in English literature from Africa and other post-colonial societies have shown, what makes a good speaker of a language is not really where s/he is born as how much s/he has applied himself/herself to mastering it. Wole Soyinka (Africa’s first Nobel Literature Prize Winner, and Nigerian) is as much a native speaker of English as Karin Barber (Yoruba scholar in Birmingham) is a native-speaker of Yoruba going by proficiency and the corpus of their literary output in the language. I doubt that anyone would doubt as well that Salman Rushdie or VS Naipaul are native speakers of English either because of their Indian ancestry.

I suspect however that this misunderstanding of what is a native speaker comes mostly from American purism – a kind of desire to protect one’s position by claiming total control of all its parts.  By this policy, I suspect that citizens of Liberia or South Africa would be given a pass as a native speaker in a job requiring that, ahead of citizens of Nigeria or Ghana. The last time I checked the TOEFL exam requirements, students from Liberia and South Africa were exempt from taking it. Go figure. If an American couple living in Nigeria gives birth to a child and raises him there for ten years, s/he would become a proficient native speaker of at least one Nigerian language and could, if s/he pursues it, be able to teach it too. The same should apply to a Chinese couple living in the United States. Their child would become proficient enough in English to be able to do anything with it.

I hope that the definition of what makes a native speaker of a language is revised to exclude stipulations of ethnic belonging to the target language. I suspect however that it already has, just that some people haven’t caught up with the news yet. 🙂