Thomas Paul Bonfiglio's Mother tongues and nations: The invention of the native speaker gives a largely chronological account of the history and ideology behind the concepts of mother tongue and native speaker in order to explore notions of native speaker authority and ethnolinguistic prejudice in Western Europe. Bonfiglio uses the term ethnolinguistic nationalism to ‘designate the confluence of folkloric notions of ethnicity, nativity, maternality, and exclusive ownership in the discourse of the national language’ (p. 6). He contends that ethnolinguistic nationalism emerged with the birth of the modern nation state and continues to this day.
Chapter 1 reviews recent literature to explore issues around native-speaker authority, as partially justified by notions of standard speech. Bonfiglio suggests that the relatively recent term native speaker does not always equate with standard speaker, but that while L2 speakers may be held accountable for ‘errors’ in their speech, L1 speakers are frequently placed above linguistic laws.
Chapter 2 focuses on antiquity, suggesting that the widespread use of Latin in the Roman Empire helped suppress the vernacular and that Latin hegemony continued throughout the Middle Ages due to the dominance of Christianity. Bonfiglio then discusses claims that both the printing press and the Reformation contributed to the increased use of the vernacular in the written word during the sixteenth century.
Continuing to look at the ancient world, chapter 3 suggests that metaphors of maternality and nativity were absent in antiquity due to the Ancient Greek interest in language in philosophical, rather than sociocultural or political, terms. Bonfiglio asserts that linguistic contact in the Roman Empire did not create nationalism as we know it today, with the Romans seemingly uninterested in linguistic imperialism.
Chapter 4 traces the emergence of maternal and native metaphors in the late Middle Ages along with the use of arboreal metaphors for language. Bonfiglio cites Dante Alighieri's defence of the vernacular in the fourteenth century as the beginning of the maternal metaphor, and the first time that the vernacular was described as superior to Latin in the West. Problems in justifying the vernacular as a fourth sacred language are outlined.
Chapter 5 describes French and German discourse on language in the eighteenth century, which reinforced European ethnolinguistic nationalist prejudices, while chapter 6 moves to European interest in Sanskrit and the nineteenth-century continuation of abstract arboreal metaphors that led to notions of language families, and strengthened the genealogical perception of language.
Chapter 7 examines infant-directed speech (motherese) and whether there is a human language instinct. Here, Bonfiglio suggests that the pervasive metaphor of the family tree is inappropriate when speaking of language development, but that it is preferred due to genetic notions of language ownership. He prefers a reticulate model, which recognises the hybrid nature of languages, and ends with the suggestion that applied linguists should stop promoting arboreal models of language in order to move away from the assumption that languages are genetically owned.
