The emergence of the English native speaker : a chapter in nineteenth-century linguistic thought

The native speaker is one of the central but at the same time most controversial concepts of modern linguistics. With regard to English, it became especially controversial with the rise of the so-called "New Englishes," where reality is much more complex than the neat distinction into native and non-native speakers would make us believe. This volume reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native speaker in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept today. A corpus of texts which includes not only the classics of the nineteenth-century linguistic literature but also numerous lesser-known articles from periodical journals of the time is investigated by means of historical discourse analysis in order to retrace the production and reproduction of this particularly important linguistic ideology. The series contributes to the development of promising new approaches to the sociolinguistic, sociohistorical and linguistic anthropological study of social issues that centrally involve language. In particular, while still addressing the fundamental insights gleaned from variationist studies, foremost among which is the open-ended, heterogeneous nature of human language in all its varieties, it focuses on new, data-driven methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, in the social and cultural study of language that go beyond the more traditional concerns of sociolinguistics (for example, social networks, communities of practice, global population movements, the historical and present-day significance of demography for situations of language contact, the spatial dimensions of language, language and ideology, new dialect formation, historical sociolinguistics). The series includes monographs as well as edited volumes Content: Pt. I. A discourse-historical approach to the English native speaker -- pt. II. ''Good'' English and the ''best'' speakers : the native speaker and standards of language, speech, and writing -- pt. III. Language, nation, and race : of Anglo-Saxons and English speakers conquering the world. Stephanie Hackert. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.