Language Education for New Speakers

This chapter examines the emergence of the category of “new speakers” in different contexts, as well as scholarly debate about the phenomenon. It focuses particularly on the processes involved in becoming a new speaker of a minority language. The term is used to refer to individuals who acquire a minority language outside of the home and come to the language through the education system or as adult learners in the context of language revitalization efforts. While focusing on minority languages and cases of language revitalization, we also wish to argue that the new speaker has wider theoretical and epistemological implications, shedding new light on the processes of production and reproduction of sociolinguistic difference and ideologies of legitimacy in multilingual contexts more generally. There are parallels also between new speakers and heritage speakers with a long trajectory in minority language contexts where English is hegemonic. The notion of new speakers is used here as a generic term with which to examine how categories of speakers are produced, reproduced, or contested in each specific context. As such, it builds on existing critiques in applied linguistics and language education policy more generally of the native speaker ideology.