The native speaker and the mother tongue

This article presents a historical account of the role and function in linguistic theorising of the concepts “native speaker” and “mother tongue”, and serves to introduce a number of articles (Language Sciences vol. 32 no. 6) raising questions about various aspects of the idealised monolingualism that underlies much modern linguistics.

Research highlights
► Native speaker and mother tongue.
► Role of these concepts in linguistic theory.
► Monolingualism vs multilingualism.
► Mother tongue and language ownership.