Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Barbara Seidlhofer

will regard the negative prefix in words such as non-violent, non-sectarian, non-predatory, non-toxic, etc. as indicating a deficit. Domestic, or combustible, or existent denote neither ‘positive’ nor ‘negative’ qualities, and the same is true of their opposites, non-domestic, non-combustible, nonexistent. How these adjectives are seen will depend entirely on the specific context. And I would argue that the same holds, in principle, for native and non-native premodifying the noun speaker: whether these adjectives indicate an advantage or a disadvantage will also depend on the context. One of the main objectives of this book is to explore just how the contexts and purposes of the use of English, and the numbers and kinds of its speakers, have changed so dramatically over recent decades that the connotations of the terms native speaker and non-native speaker are bound to change too. As we shall see, when we consider the important roles English has come to play in people’s lives all over the world outside ‘native speaker’ communities, being a ‘native speaker’ ceases to be an asset.

      There is much published criticism of the terms ‘native’ and ‘non-native’, which I do not need to repeat here. The issues involved are discussed from the perspective of English as a lingua franca, and alternative labels offered, in Jenkins 2000: 6ff. While I fully endorse Jenkins’ reasoning, I do not generally adopt alternative labels at this point, one reason being that this would result in a confusing mixture of terminology, particularly because I often quote from secondary literature that uses the traditional labels. The main reason though is that I have come to the conclusion that it is not even necessary to use quotation marks when I employ the terms myself. This is because I take them to mean very simply what they actually denote (rather than what they have come to connote for many): a native-speaker of English is somebody whose L1 is English, and a non-native speaker of English is somebody who has an L1, or L1s, other than English. One thing we know about the non-native speakers (but not about native speakers) is that they are at least bilingual.