The Concept of Native Speaker in Modern Linguistics And the native Speaker of Arabic
Keywords:
native speaker, fasih Arabic, modern standard Arabic, High forms and Low forms in language, White’s language acquisition model.Abstract
The current research paper presents the running debate concerning the concept of “native speaker” in modern Linguistics and the controversies of its definition discussed in the literature. It also sheds light on related technical terms that have emerged in the midst of this profound academic debate whose comprehension is taken to be necessary for Arabic scholarship. The debate in Western linguistic scholarship is relevant to both fasih (classical) Arabic and Arabic heritage. It discusses the extent to which the concept of the native speaker applies to the speaker of High Form (standard) Arabic in the modern era and its Low Form (non-standard language). The paper concludes that there is no native speaker of the standard Arabic in the history of Arabic language after the fourth century of Hijri calendar. At the end of the research, the model presented by White (2007: 37-41) is applied to the acquisition of standard and non-standard Arabic.
