Native speakers, mother tongues and natural semantic metalanguages

Anna Wierzbicka’s semantics of primes and universals is hereby presented, in a manner requiring from the reader little familiarity with linguistic theory, as an example of a failed attempt to develop an understanding of, and a theoretical apparatus capable of dealing with, language in heteroglossia. But it is an instructive failure: it indicates a need for a linguistics from the perspective of which people’s metalinguistic awareness and practices are not disregarded.