Language Sciences xxx (2010) xxxxxx

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Language Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci

Native speakers, mother tongues and other objects of wonder

Alexander V. Kravchenko
Baikal National University of Economics and Law, Irkutsk, Russia

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
This paper questions the presumptions standing behind such rmly established notions in conventional mainstream linguistics as native speakers, mother tongue, linguistic fact, monoglot community. While linguists routinely appeal to native speakers as informants in dening facts about a particular language spoken by a particular community, these facts then being used in identifying individual languages as separate semiotic systems governed by specic sets of rules, there do not seem to be clearly delineated grounds on which native speakers linguistic performance is viewed as exemplary for communication in a given tongue, thus serving as a kind of standard to be achieved by those whose mother tongue is different and whose cultural identity, for that reason, is also different. It is argued that the empirical value of linguistic competence, allegedly characteristic of native speakers, is insubstantial, and the concept of monoglossia ought to be radically revised. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Available online xxxx Keywords: Linguistic fact Mother tongue Native speaker Structuralism Universal grammar

Nothing is so rmly believed as that which is least known Montaigne

1. Some commonly used denitions and presumptions behind them The established view of linguistics as a science is that it is the study of verbal patterns, or words, which exist as more or less autonomous entities that possess meanings (whatever those are) and are combined and recombined to produce sentences/utterances as expressions of thoughts which are exchanged in the process of communication. This view is epitomized in encyclopedias, dictionaries, school and college texts and the like (Akmajian et al., 1990; Collinge, 1990; Hudson, 2000 inter alia). However, this is not a scientic denition of language and its function; rather, it is a nave conceptualization sustained by literal interpretation of the world view as manifested in the expressions of the very same language linguists attempt to dene. As has been emphasized elsewhere (Harris, 1981; Love, 2004; Kravchenko, 2008a), myths linguistics lives by continue to hold strong, and commonsense reasoning about language, done in the very same language, is often taken for scientic explanation. As observed by Lightfoot (1999), the study of language is still in its infancy, and many of our ideas are quite crude. Although the language we use draws a profoundly physicalist picture of itself, presenting its units (used for the expression of thoughts) as discrete objects that are manipulated by language users, nevertheless it does not become a manipulable thing or a set of such things, commonly referred to as sign system, symbolic system, or, simply, code. While it would never occur to anyone to interpret an expression such as You broke my heart as a physically accurate description of what really happened (that is, that an anatomical organ responsible for the functioning of the entire organism literally disintegrated into pieces), expressions such as I gave him a few ideas to play with, or He put the thought away, I cant nd the right words
E-mail address: sashakr@isea.ru 0388-0001/$ - see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2010.07.008

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to express my meaning, or I managed to get my message across, are often taken at face value, and words (just as ideas that words stand for) are hypostatized into special things that are in the head as a kind of storage facility for the so-called mental lexicon (Aitchison, 1987; Pinker, 1999 inter alia). This propensity to misinterpret reality may be seen everywhere where traditional linguistic concepts are involved, as linguistics has profoundly misconstrued language through its myths about autonomy, systematicity and the rule-bound nature of language (Pennycook, 2008, p. 22). It is only to be regretted that linguistics has not yet become a science whose objective is to come to grips with reality by offering an insightful, or, at least, comprehensible answer to the repeatedly asked question, What is language? Depending on how it is answered, basic linguistic construals within various theoretical frameworks may differ considerably. This fully applies to the notion of native speaker and its interpretation: as native speaker is someone speaking a language, the question of language ontology will be addressed in a subsequent section. Within the structuralist paradigm, it is common practice to refer to separate particular languages as symbolic systems used by particular communities for communication; these symbolic systems are specic manifestations of language as the rule-governed use of such systems. A set of rules a concrete language is subject to is best described by analyzing linguistic data provided by native speakers; native speakers performance is believed to be exemplary because they possess competence which non-native speakers lack. These concepts are of great importance to the mainstream linguist, whose ideal project is to nd and describe facts about a particular language. Yet, they appear to be highly questionable. Although the notion of native speaker lacks clarity and poses a number of methodological questions (Coulmas, 1981; Singh, 1998, 2006), popular reference resources such as www.wikipedia.org, tell us that: A native speaker is one speaking his native language. A native language is a language used prociently by a native inhabitant of that languages base country; alternatively referred to as mother tongue; alternatively, mother tongue may also refer to the rst language learned at home in childhood (not necessarily ones mothers), while ones true native tongue may be different. A language is a dynamic set of visual, auditory, or tactile symbols of communication (i.e., a code) and the elements used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon. While denitions of this sort seem, intuitively, to be based on common sense which is only natural this does not necessarily entail that so-called common sense holds some kind of trump so it always beats science (Spurrett, 2004, p. 497). Novel linguistic concepts often have a hard time penetrating a curricular tradition that legitimates the imposition of school grammar on the living language (Goodman and Goodman, 2006). Although the inherent complexity of native speaker status is an often admitted fact (Davies, 2001; Rubin and Lim, 2006), and the concept of mother tongue is viewed as no longer sufcient (Singh, 2006), when educational issues are raised, particularly those pertaining to linguistic education, tradition outweighs empirical facts, and insightful theoretical approaches have a hard time establishing themselves as part of the mainstream thinking about language. It could be argued that, at any particular time in its history, science is, essentially, a set of beliefs based on tradition, which itself is rooted in the institutionalized praxis of the previous generations of scientists. However, what makes science really different from plain common sense is that it evolves in time just as human praxis changes with the culturalhistorical development of the species, making certain established facts obsolete regardless of what common sense may tell us. And I am going to argue that the concepts of native speaker, mother tongue, linguistic fact to name but a few much exploited in conventional linguistics, have become obsolete notions that must be radically revised, if not abandoned. It is not hard to see the presumptions that stand behind the above listed denitions, namely, that: (i) As a set of symbols (semiotic system) used for communication, a language is an object that can be manipulated. (ii) Symbol manipulations (language use) are rule-governed. (iii) Language use (language as a phenomenon) depends on genetic predisposition found in humans, therefore, its characteristic feature is Universal Grammar (UG) which is innate to humans and shared by all languages. (iv) UG is responsible for organizing verbally expressed thoughts which humans exchange in communication. (v) Since rules are in the head (Pinker, 1999), they are responsible for linguistic competence which underlies actual performance and affects prociency. (vi) Thus, a native speakers competence is genetically pre-wired, making mother tongue something pure, and linguistic performance of native speakers exemplary for communication in a given tongue. (vii) A community of native speakers is a monoglot community impacting on the cultural/linguistic identity of its members. These presumptions have been deeply ingrained in thinking about language (be it layman or professional), and a lot of current theorizing about language is, one way or another, based on a number of such presumptions which have become virtual axioms (Kravchenko, 2008a). True, dissatisfaction with at least some of these axioms has led to the emergence of new approaches, for example, to grammar, such as cognitive grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991) and construction grammar (Goldberg, 1995), and an experience-based theory of language is in the making (Bod, 1998; Tomasello, 2003). However, the conventional views on language and the related notions of native speaker, mother tongue, monoglot community and the like still

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dominate the educational eld and popular reference resources as shown by the above cited Wikipedia. This makes one wonder what evidence sustains such views.

2. Looking for evidence and nding none Let us take a closer look at the presumptions listed in the previous section, and ask what would appear a rather trivial question: Are these presumptions institutionalized? The answer, of course, is yes, because every time we turn to an encyclopedic dictionary, or an introductory textbook on linguistics, or any other similar source of reference, it is exactly these presumptions we are sure to nd, even be it in different form or wording. However, these presumptions are not made on reasonable grounds or good evidence. What grounds are reasonable? If we turn to an authoritative dictionary such as Websters Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, we will nd that reasonable means agreeing to sound judgment, and sound judgment is just another way of saying common sense. Consider a few examples of sound judgment of not long ago: (1) The earth is at. (2) The Sun rotates round the Earth. (3) Apparatuses heavier than air cannot y. Examples like this show only too well the relative nature of knowledge on which we base our judgments in everyday life. These judgments are not made off-hand, of course, they are usually based on good evidence, such as our observation of the movement of the sun across the sky, when our senses tell us that it rises in the morning, follows a certain trajectory at daytime, and sets in the evening. This is a geo-anthropocentric world view, when our immediate physical environment, or existential locus, is taken as the ultimate point-of-reference in describing the world. Likewise, language as dynamically complex cognitive activity, in which we are immersed even before we have been brought unto this world, is the existential dynamic (activity-driven) environment of humans as a social species, essential no less, and noticeable no more than, the very air we breathe. It is not surprising that our world view should not only be geocentric, but also heavily anthropocentric, and since we, as humans, happen in language (Maturana, 1978), and language is the building material for the world we think we live in (Humboldt, 1820; Sapir, 1929; Whorf, 1956; Imoto, 2005), the view of language shared by humans (and, especially, by linguists as language scientists) is thoroughly biased. As Harris (2005) has convincingly shown, science itself is a construct of language, held together by means of an idiosyncratic semantics designed to give it credibility: science is a construct of language because scientists impose their language on what they assume is there to be named by that language. And in doing so, they rely on what they hold to be good evidence something obvious that cannot be denied. But what evidence is good? If, again, looking for an answer we turn to the dictionary just like a layman does in search for the denition of a words meaning, when the word appears unfamiliar and the meaning unclear or elusive we will learn that good evidence is a palpable sign grounded in experience. Ready examples of good evidence would be an oasis in the desert as evidence of water, or empty beer cans in the forest as evidence of human presence. At the same time, the following judgments would seem undoubtedly sound to any normal individual: (4) An oasis in the desert IS NOT water. (5) Empty beer cans in the forest ARE NOT human presence. It is our experience of the world, our knowledge of the way things are, that tells us more or less reliably that water will be found in an oasis, or that humans must have been in the forest if we see a litter of empty beer cans in a clearing. And we can tell things like that precisely because we have experience of water as physical substance which can be found in particular places (not necessarily in an oasis), or beer cans as physical objects manufactured and used by humans as containers for a particular kind of beverage. As evidence for language linguists take specic recursive acoustic phenomena (verbal patterns, or utterances) in the dynamically complex behavior of humans. But just as the above judgments appear undeniably reasonable, the following judgment is also quite reasonable: (6) Verbal patterns ARE NOT language. This requires a little elaboration. Evidence as a palpable sign of something believed to exist in real space/time is our human way of describing the relationships between different things in our phenomenal world, or the cognitive domain of interactions. Outside the domain of human experience, water does not relate to the palm trees in an oasis, just like palm trees do not relate to water. It is our nding them together that prompts a semiotic explanation in terms of signs (A is a sign of B), but, ontologically, signs are just a category of physical entities singled out by humans guided by their pragmatic goal of orienting in this world (Kravchenko, 2003a, 2007a). If verbal patterns are signs, or evidence of, language, than the thought behind this is that verbal patterns and language are things always found together lets say, like smoke and re (smoke is a sign of re), but that verbal patterns are not language, just like smoke is not re. Phenomenal entities categorized as verbal
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patterns are virtual, they are the result of taking a language stance by human organisms while soft-assembling themselves as living systems (Cowley 2007, 2008). If this is the case, what evidence for language is there? Standard examples of palpable linguistic evidence for language are: parts of texts known as sentences, parts of sentences known as words, parts of words known as letters (moreover, as Port (2008) argues, phones and phonemes are letters in disguise). In other words, mainstream linguistics displays an extreme written language bias (Linell, 2005). A common denition of a language given at the beginning of this paper (a dynamic set of visual, auditory, or tactile symbols of communication and the elements used to manipulate them) shows this bias very clearly: e.g., visual or tactile (such as the Braille alphabet) linguistic symbols are letters of which written words (sentences, texts) are made, and as such they are, of course, manipulable physical things which writers in a particular language combine and recombine. But they are not natural linguistic signs (verbal patterns as acoustic phenomena); all of these are second-order cultural constructs created by linguists. They are manipulable artifacts used in second-order activity for example, when we analyze written texts. Far from being linguistic evidence, sentences (words, texts) are descriptive construals; as such, they do not exist independently of languaging humans immersed in the ux of cognitive interactions of which verbal patterns are just a specic dimension. That is why judgments about grammaticality of sentences vary among native speakers of a particular language. So, rather than being rule-governed, the correctness of sentences is a social fact (Itkonen, 2003, p. 114). In other words, there isnt such a thing as purely linguistic data (Ross, 2007). 3. Exploring the implications behind denitions Let us take a closer look at some of the implications inherent in mainstream thinking about language: (i) A native speaker (one who uses language prociently) manipulates symbols in an exemplary way, hence (ii) Native speakers have authority as informants for linguists to decide about linguistic facts pertaining to a particular language. A number of issues seem to arise here, all related to the sense in which the word exemplary may be used with reference to how native speakers manipulate symbols. Although in the literature devoted to native speakers and their role as touchstones in deciding on what should be considered as linguistic facts for a particular language the word exemplary is not routinely used, the thinking behind discussions of native speakers and mother tongues is often precisely this that linguistic behavior of someone speaking his mother tongue is an example of how such behavior (languaging) should be enacted. With this in view, exemplary might be used in a sense similar to that in which some cognitive scientists speak of better representatives of a category, dening them as prototypes. However, if a robin is a prototype for the category bird, that is, the best example (of course, the question remains, Best example for whom?), it surely does not mean that all other birds, which are not robins and dont do things, such as ying, the way robins do, are somehow worse off. Similarly, when linguists speak of native speakers linguistic behavior in the context of their status as exemplary speakers, surely they cannot mean that acoustic patterns (symbols) used by any native speaker are identical to those used by each and every native speaker unless some kind of performance invariant is involved here, on analogy with the notorious semantic invariant. Perhaps, they mean that any native speakers performance is an example of how things should be done with words in a monoglot community, this performance being the manifestation of pre-wired competence? Hardly so. Although the conventional linguist does not seem to be either aware of, or willing to explore, the implication behind his thinking of the native speakers behavior (performance) as exemplary, what is really meant here is that a native speakers performance is something by which he may be identied by other native speakers as one of us, in contrast to them as not us one of the most fundamental distinctions in the world of the living. But what facts about language make an other one of us, someone whose linguistic behavior we perceive as exemplary? In keeping with the conventional views, it is either the fact that it is their mother tongue, or that they are procient in it (that is, experts), or that they all speak the same variety of language and, because of that, constitute a monoglot community. Another believed fact is that their cultural identities cannot be separated from their look-alike linguistic identities, which together make them distinctly different from non-native speakers coming from other cultures. However, to the disappointment of the conventional linguist, none of the above may be admitted as a fact. Or, to be more precise, Its not facts about language that allow to speak about monoglot communities: its em linguists. Because its linguists who establish facts about languages. Strikingly, most of these facts are based on very little evidence, or even on no evidence at all, and no comprehensive theory exists to tell us all we would like to know about language (Mahboob and Knight, 2008). As has been argued elsewhere (Kravchenko, 1992, 2003b, 2004, 2008a,b), many so-called linguistic truths one nds in the linguistic literature have little to do with real facts; for example, counter to the established view: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) The function of language is NOT to communicate thoughts. Verbal patterns are NOT symbolic. Meanings are NOT contained in linguistic signs. The primary function of pronouns is NOT anaphoric. Grammatical tense does NOT reect the so-called objective time.

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(f) Verbal aspect is NOT about the internal temporal structure of events. (g) The difference between the demonstratives like this and that is NOT one of distance between the speaker and the referent, etc. When linguists speak of linguistic facts, they often behave like skilful street magicians who deftly manipulate things which seem to appear out of, and disappear into, thin air. First, they write dictionaries for the layman, explaining the meanings of words, collocations, idioms, and the like, and grammars, explaining the rules for manipulating words. Then they begin to use the words they have explained in such a way that one cannot but wonder at the sheer audacity of these language magicians. Trying to answer the question, What qualies as a linguistic fact?, we learn from a dictionary that a fact is that which actually exists; reality, while reality is something that exists independently of ideas concerning it (Websters Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language). This begs the question, Do languages exist independently of what linguists think about them? Not unexpectedly like almost in any situation pertaining to linguistics as the study of language the answer may be either Yes or No, it all depends on what is understood by language. The answer is yes, if language is (the use of) symbolic systems (manipulable things, codes) out there, which exist independently of what we think about them and are used for the transfer of thoughts from one head to another according to the conduit metaphor (Reddy, 1979; Cowley and Love, 2006), or the telementation doctrine (Harris, 1996). The answer is most denitely no, if language is a bio-socio-culturally constructed dimension of the complex cognitive dynamics characteristic of individual humans and communities as second-order and third-order living systems, respectively (Cowley, 2004; Kravchenko, 2007b, 2008a). A third-order living system is constituted by individual organisms as second-order living systems which have a shared developmental history; it is this shared history of ne structural coupling with the environment (including the domain of linguistic interactions) that enables individuals to identify with a particular community. Language is not a capacity but a relational (behavioral) domain; it is best viewed as adaptive functional activity based on an organisms experience of the bio-socio-cultural environment to which the organism stands in a relation of reciprocal causality (Kravchenko, 2003b). As Maturana et al. (1995) emphasize, language takes place in the relational domain as a manner of living, and not in the brain as a phenomenon of the operational and structural dynamics of the nervous system. < > [W]e human beings exist as systemic entities in the dynamic mutual modulation of our particular bodyhood < > and our particular manner of living, the human manner of living in language (p. 2). The fundamental property of language is its experiential nature, and linguistic behavior is behavior in a shared physical, social and cultural context when interlocked conducts are characterized by reciprocal causality as a result of structural coupling between structurally plastic organisms (Kravchenko, 2009a). The linguistic behavior of individual native speakers is exemplary not so much because of a shared mother tongue, but because it is based in shared developmental history (consensual domain of interactions). But shared is not synonymous to identical with all the important consequences entailed. 4. The pitfalls of communication in a monoglot community In traditional linguistic parlance, I am a native speaker of Russian, born in Irkutsk Province in Eastern Siberia, where I have lived all my life. The variety of Russian spoken in the area is not marked phonologically to qualify as a specic regional dialect (unlike many local dialects spoken in the European parts of Russia, such as Moscow, Kostroma, or the Volga area). In fact, with a few lexical idiosyncrasies as exceptions, the variety of Russian spoken in Eastern Siberia is similar in status to Midwestern in the US or Received Pronunciation in the UK. In Soviet Russia, with obligatory secondary education delivered in Russian as the ofcial language, any normal person aged 18 and above was expected to have completed 10 years of schooling and be prepared for further effective functioning in a society constituted by native speakers of Russian (presumably procient in the Russian language as their mother tongue to a degree when their linguistic performance may be described as exemplary). In the late 1970s, I was drafted in the Soviet Army in violation of the law (as it later turned out, I was exempt from active service). Like many Soviet citizens, I didnt know my rights (ofcial texts of effective legislative acts were not made public), but the draftsmen did, so I ended up in a uniquely Soviet military unit known as strojbat (short for stroitelnyj bataljon construction battalion) in the City of Chita, which is farther east from Irkutsk, but not too far, by the Russian measure. The ofcial purpose such units served was construction of military objects, but in real life the servicemen were used as free (often unskilled) labor, both on the military and civil sides. My ofcial position was night watchman at the HQ plus messenger, so one day I was sent on an errand to nd a private named Anatoly Smoliakoff, whom I knew personally, to tell him that his wife had come to the base to visit. Anatoly (Tolik, for short) came from a small rural township in Irkutsk Province, where he had lived all of his 22 years or so. What follows is the conversation that took place when I found him: (7) Tolik, get to the main gate check-point on the double, your wifes waitin there for ya. Whassat? Your wife s there, Im tellin ya. Chief o Staffs sent me to nd ya.

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What wife? How dyou mean what wife? Are you married? Yeah. . . So now, your wifes come to see ya. Which? What dya mean, which? How manyve you got them wives? Well, one I guess. There now, she done come to see ya. Who? Your wife, man! Dyou dig it? Your wi-i-i-fffe! What about wife? Shes come! Where? To the check-point! So? Get your ass there! Why? To see your wife! What wife? ...

After about 10 min of this frustrating exchange I got totally exasperated and produced a very long, extremely emphatic, and highly sophisticated linguistic construction consisting of only two Russian obscene words and their numerous derivatives of various complexity. Toliks face lit up, he sighed with relief, gave me a broad congenial smile and, sounding a bit scornful, uttered: Why didn ya say so at once? Off he went in the direction I had futilely tried to send him, while I was suddenly seized by a t of laughter of the kind I had never experienced before (nor after, for the record). And of course, the question, in the context of the present discussion, is, What cognitive/communicative phenomenon are we dealing with here? In keeping with the initial presumptions mentioned in the rst section of the paper, the following assertions seem in place:  Both parties speak their mother tongue (in both of the senses, as native language and as rst language), which is Russian.  Since they speak (supposedly) the same variety of language (language as the use of a common symbolic system, or code), they are members of a monoglot community.  As they are native speakers of Russian (native inhabitants of that languages base country more than that, native inhabitants of the same geographic area), they are procient in it by denition (they are experts).  As members of a monoglot community, they (supposedly) belong to the same culture.  Because of the above, their cultural/linguistic identities should display strong similarities, while noticeably differing from those whose mother tongue is not Russian. All these considered, whence the communication problem? The answer is rather obvious: The communication problem arises because the initial presumptions are wrong. As a language, Russian, for example, is identied as a system of symbols used by the inhabitants of the area called Russia. This system is physically distinct from other such symbolic systems, which is to say that when exposed to the sound of Russian speech, speakers of other languages (a) Do not recognize the perceived sound patterns (symbols) as belonging to their language (they are not part of their consensual domain of interactions); (b) This precludes extraction of information from these symbols, that is, interpretation of their use based on shared developmental history; and (c) The speaker of Russian is identied as not one of us. However, despite the fact that in the anecdotal example considered here both parties speak their mother tongue and are, supposedly, members of a monoglot community (they recognize each others sound patterns), extraction of information (at least for one interlocutor) does not occur. This indicates that: (i) The communicants (just as their mothers or caretakers at the time) probably dont speak the same language variety.
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(ii) If so, they are not members of a monoglot community and dont belong to the same culture. (iii) Consequently, their cultural/linguistic identities are dissimilar. If, however, they still DO speak Russian, what makes it Russian? Clearly, it isnt the shared code, or culture, or identity because (natural, spoken) language is not a symbolic system, or a common code (Love, 2004; Kravchenko, 2007a); it is something else. 5. What is language? The answer to this question, given by mainstream linguistics, is incoherent, because language as a natural phenomenon a kind of dynamically complex patterned behavior, which should be the true object of linguistic study is confused with language as a system of written signs designed to represent (very often in a quite arbitrary fashion) short-lived acoustic phenomena that accompany communicative behavior. Although written language is, in fact, a system based on the use of a limited set of characters and, because of this, resembling a code, it does not represent language as a specic kind of cognitive interactions with the environment, or orientational activity in real space/time. Spoken and written language possess different ontologies and simply cannot be viewed as two different manifestations of the same phenomenon (Kravchenko, 2009b). Cognition is a function of living systems as unities of interactions which exist in an environment in structural coupling (Maturana, 1970; Jrvilehto, 1998); human cognition exploits the world beyond the body (Hutchins, 1995). According to the internalist account of cognition and language (for discussion, see Kravchenko, 2007b), linguistic behavior is what cognizing humans do as a result of the processes that take place in the brain, that is, it is dened by the structure and physiology of the organism (hence the generativist notion of language organ). However, because regularities in linguistic behavior pertain to the domain in which the behavior is described by the observer, or to the relational domain of interactions, in which the behavior of an organism is dened under the conditions in which the organism realizes its autopoiesis, they are descriptions of the original structure of the organism at each interaction and are not determined by the nature of the selecting behavior (Maturana, 1978). Languaging is behavior in a consensual domain; it is, therefore, a description of the structure of the organism at the moment such behavior is enacted, while the structure of the organism itself is the result of a history of reciprocal structural coupling between organisms. A human baby, through successive stages of its development, is structurally coupled with other organisms such as the caregiver, for example, whose linguistic behavior plays an important role in the young organisms tuning to the environment as a relational domain of interactions. Because language extends the human sensorium (Morris, 1938), from which it cannot be separated either for ontological or epistemological reasons, and because human organisms are structure determined living systems,1 linguistic interactions that constitute a dimension of the cognitive domain of an organism become the relational domain in which humans exist as unities of interactions. As a bio-socio-culturally constructed dimension of the human cognitive dynamics, language depends on socio-cultural contingencies: from a biocultural perspective, the human language capacity, although it is almost certainly supported by genetic adaptations to maximize exploitation of the human biocultural niche, is not innate, but epigenetically developed (Sinha, 2009, p. 306). Language describes a heterogeneous set of artifacts and practices which enable us to exploit behavioral modalities in ways allowing the attribution of semiotic values: meaning (M) emerges as the relation between an organism (O) and its physical and cultural environment (E), determined by the value (V) of E for O: M = V (O, E) (Zlatev, 2003). Different variables in the relation lead to different meanings and, thus, to different linguistic identities. Because we as humans happen in language, different linguistic identities imply different cultural identities, but not vice versa. A life-time of linguistic experience (both dialogical interactions in real space/time and interactions with written texts as second-order cultural artifacts) plays a decisive role in dening an individuals linguistic/cultural identity, so that quantitatively and qualitatively incompatible experiences of any two individuals, allegedly speaking the same mother tongue, result in failure at least, for one of them to identify the other as one of us, that is, an organism with a similar original structure determined (in the case of humans) by its history of linguistic interactions. Thus, the concept of monoglot community a community of living systems as unities of interactions with identical developmental histories (native speakers) appears to have very little empirical value, if any. With this in view, it becomes clear why Tolik from the anecdote, with his unfortunately very limited, if not decient, history of linguistic interactions, failed to identify me as one of us: the sounds of my speech, literally, didnt ring the bell with him, although we were both native speakers of the same language. But who, even among the most hardened orthodox linguists, would have the heart to claim that someone like Tolik possessed a native speakers competence, which accounted for his exemplary performance? The written language bias in mainstream linguistics when, rather than focusing on the study of language as a second-order consensual domain of interactions, linguists have been busy with the study of written texts as cultural artifacts is responsible for the peculiar situation the conventional linguist seems unwilling to admit: by and large, any number and any kind of linguistic facts gleaned from linguistic data (that is, written words, sentences, texts) are nothing more than educated interpretations; the entire issue of native speakers competence seems to be an issue of
1 A structure determined system is a system such that all that happens in it or with it arises as a consequence of its structural dynamics, and in which nothing external to it can specify what happens in it, but only triggers a change in its structure determined by its structure (Maturana, 2000, p. 461).

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educationally predetermined preferences. And very often at least, in the area of linguistics education has been understood (and implemented) as indoctrination. Its time linguists started to really educate themselves about language, departing from unproductive doctrines and looking for new, empirically sustainable, approaches. 6. Just wondering. . . As a father, I have spoken English (which is not my mother tongue) to my children from the day they were born, and they are all uent in it. Psychologically, they have neither perceived English as a foreign language, nor their father as a non-native speaker. To them, English is a father tongue the language their father speaks to them. When, on a few occasions, I slipped and addressed them in Russian, they would make big eyes, look at me incredulously, and say: Dad, whats with you? Are you aware that youre speaking Russian? The idea itself that their father could (should? ought to? had better?) speak Russian to them is, and has always been, unthinkable, although its perfectly normal for him to speak Russian in their presence to other people. By speaking English to them, and Russian to other people, I thereby let them know that they and I were us, and those others were them. But this is only part of the story. My children have never spoken English to me, not once! Even while we were in an English-speaking community for an extended period of time (I was then teaching linguistics courses at an American university), they would invariably speak Russian to me and English to everybody else. I am inclined to think that, by doing so, they refused to categorize their father as one of them, i.e. the local community of native speakers of English. At the same time, while speaking English, they very quickly picked the local accent (South Texan), and it was soon impossible even for an experienced linguist to identify them as Russian speakers of English. Obviously, each of the children needed to be accepted by the very same community as one of us, but the degree of adaptation was different in each case: from the highest (native speaker) in the 10-year-old to very high (almost like native speaker) in the 15-year-old to high (slight accent that could not be placed as Russian) in the 17-year-old, who had already completed her secondary education in Russia. Are my children native speakers of English? I am not sure about that. There is, however, no doubt that my childrens father tongue, along with their mother tongue, has impacted on their linguistic/cultural identities. Do they, as a result, suffer from split identities? Certainly not. Are they (and I) Russian? I dont have an answer to this question. References
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