The NYTimes had an interesting article on language, specifically focused on language attrition (and the possibility of losing one’s first language). Admist the discussion was this fascinating tidbit:
Regarding a first language as having special value is itself the product of a worldview that places national belonging at the heart of individual life. The phrase “native speaker” was first used by the politician and philologist George Perkins Marsh, who spoke of the importance of “home-born English.” It came with more than a light prejudicial overtone. Among Marsh’s recommendations was the need for “special precautions” to protect English from “becoming debased and vulgarized … by association with depraved beings and unworthy themes.”
The idea of a single, native language took hold in linguistics in the mid-20th century, a uniquely monolingual time in human history. American culture, with its emphasis on assimilation, was especially hostile to the notion that a single person might inhabit multiple languages. Parents were discouraged from teaching their children languages other than English, even if they expressed themselves best in that other language. The simultaneous acquisition of multiple tongues was thought to cause delays in language development and learning. As Aneta Pavlenko, a linguist at Drexel University and the University of York, has noted, families who spoke more than one language were looked down on by politicians and ignored by linguists through the 1970s. “Early bilinguals,” those who learned two languages in childhood, “were excluded from research as ‘unusual’ or ‘messy’ subjects,” she writes. By contrast, late bilinguals, those who learned a second language in school or adulthood, were treated as “representative speakers of their first language.” The fact that they spoke a second language was disregarded. This focus on the importance of a single language may have obscured the historical record, giving the impression that humans are more monolingual and more rigid in their speech than they are.
It’s amazing what blinders we have. I had never tied up the notion of native tongue with a nativist movement. I had a friend who studied ethnology in the Balkans and Turkey and she always observed, when it comes to ethnic identity, religion trumps language (e.g. the population swap between Turkey and Greece based on religion, even when the speakers spoke the language local to where they were being swapped from). But language is a key element. Yet still, I never really thought about nativism and nationalism affected such basic linguistic concepts as native tongue.
Ramblings 