🌈 Sapporo English Conversation Newsletter 🌝

 

(この記事は、「ネイティヴ・スピーカー」はどこから来たのか？――英語から日本語へと辿っての英語訳です。）

 

In my previous post, The Growing Number of Native English Speakers in Sapporo, I tried to find out how many native English speakers lived in Sapporo.  Every year, I seemed to hear more people speaking native-level English on the streets of Sapporo, and I figured it would be easy to find out just how many there actually were.  It turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected, and the short post I meant to write kept growing as I ran into one twist after another.

After that, I decided to turn my attention to the Japanese word for native:  ネイティヴ (neiteivu) or ネイティブ (neiteibu).  Why were there two different spellings?  And how did the single word “native” come to mean the same thing as the two-word phrase “native speaker”?  At first, it seemed like a simple question.  Surely someone had already answered it—I just needed to find the answer.  Then I could write about why I preferred the spelling ネイティヴ over the now-standard ネイティブ.  Well, that never happened, because the deeper I dug, the longer my post became.  So I’ll save the discussion of the difference between ヴ (vu) and ブ (bu) for next time.  Here’s the trail I ended up following.

 

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“Native” meanings and usage

Before getting into its history, let’s look at how “native” is actually used in English.  It is primarily an adjective, and when used to refer to people, it means “having been born in a particular place or belonging to its original inhabitants”:

1)  Aboriginal Australians are the native inhabitants of Australia.

2)  Native people were allowed to retain some sense of their traditional culture and religion. 

3)  Native guides accompanied the expedition through the rainforest. 

4)  She moved to Tokyo, but she is a native New Yorker.

 

As a noun referring to people, “native” means “a person who was born in a particular place or is originally from there”:

1)  Judy is a native of Scotland now living in the United States.

2)  Dr. Aubin is a native of St. Blaise.

3)  He is a native of France, but he has lived in the United States for most of his life.

 

When used in relation to language, “native” refers to the language a person first learned as a child:

1)  She spoke not only her native language, Swedish, but also English and French.

2)  French is not my native tongue.

3)  Although Kara speaks Spanish fluently, Mandarin is her native language.

 

Finally, we have the term “native speaker,” which refers to someone who has learned the language as a child and has spoken it since early childhood:

1)  Although he has studied Spanish for years, he will never speak it exactly like a native speaker.

2)  When planning a trip to London, it is helpful to practice conversational English with a native speaker. 

3)  Even though Jim has studied hard for ten years, it is very difficult for him to speak French like a native speaker.

 

The phrase “native speaker” can be further specified by adding the preposition “of” and the target language:

1)  Dmitri is a native speaker of Russian.

2)  Since Naomi’s parents are from Tokyo, she is a native speaker of Japanese. 

 

Alternatively, the language name can sit as an adjective right between the words “native” and “speaker”:

1)  Anna writes and speaks flawlessly because she is a native Russian speaker.

2)  The international company is looking to hire a native English speaker to translate their corporate documents.

3)  Although Keiko has lived in Madrid for ten years, she still does not sound like a native Spanish speaker.

 

There is an important difference between how English and Japanese put these words together.  In Japanese, the name of the language comes before ネイティブスピーカー.  For example, “native English speaker” can be expressed as:

• 英語のネイティブスピーカー
• 英語ネイティブスピーカー

It can also be shortened to:

• 英語ネイティブ

English works differently.  The language name cannot simply be placed at the beginning of the phrase.  Instead, it is inserted between native and speaker, or it comes after the phrase with the preposition of:

• a native German speaker / native German speakers
• a native speaker of Taiwanese / native speakers of Taiwanese

There is another important difference.  In Japanese, ネイティブスピーカー can be shortened to ネイティブ while still keeping the meaning of “native speaker.”  English does not work that way.

For example, if we remove speaker from a native Korean speaker, we are left with:

• a native Korean
    a person originally from Korea

Without speaker, the meaning of Korean depends on how it is used:  it can refer to a person originally from Korea, or it can function as an adjective referring to the Korean language.

• a native Korean accent
    an accent that sounds like that of a native speaker of Korean
• native Korean pronunciation
    pronunciation characteristic of native speakers of Korean

A similar issue occurs when the language comes after native speaker:

• a native speaker of Korean →  a native of Korean  (incorrect)

Here, native becomes a noun referring to a person who was born in a particular place or is originally from there, but the correct expression is a native of Korea:

• a native of Korea / natives of Korea

So although native speaker and ネイティブスピーカー may look like direct equivalents, they don’t behave in exactly the same way.  In English, native speaker is a set phrase referring to someone who acquired a language in childhood and has spoken it since an early age.  In Japanese, ネイティブスピーカー can be shortened to ネイティブ without losing that language-related meaning.

These uses of native and native speaker might look simple at first glance, but as we’ve just seen, the two languages don’t map onto each other as neatly as you might expect.  Looking closely at that mismatch raised another question:  how did Japanese get from native speaker to simply native?  That question led me down a long trail of discovery.

 

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“Native” arrives in Japan

Now, let’s look at some of the earliest evidence of “native” in Japanese.  In 1862, native appeared in Tatsunosuke Hori’s A Pocket Dictionary of the English and Japanese Language (英和對譯袖珍辭書, Eiwa Taiyaku Shūchin Jisho).  Hori, a Dutch interpreter (通詞, tsūji, government interpreter) who served during Commodore Perry’s arrival in 1853, was commissioned by the Tokugawa shogunate to compile what became the first printed English–Japanese dictionary in Japan.  This is the earliest printed dictionary entry that I have found for the word:

• native, s., 其土地ニ生レタル人, sono tochi ni umaretaru hito, a person born in that place
• native, adj., 根元ノ生レ付キノ生レノ, nemoto no, original; umaretsuki no, inborn; umare no, by birth
• native country, 本国, honkoku, the country in which one was born

 

 

English–Japanese dictionaries published in 1872, 1873, 1887 and 1890 contained virtually unchanged definitions.  The dictionaries explained the English word, but they didn’t show how Japanese speakers actually wrote its pronunciation.

In 1871, the phrase “native country” was spelled out phonetically as 子ーテ井ブ コーントリイ (ネーテイブ コーントリイ in modern katakana) in A Popular Vocabulary of English (通俗英吉利単語篇, Tsūzoku Igirisu Tangohen).  It’s one of the earliest printed examples I’ve found of the word rendered in katakana in a complete phrase.

 

 

The following year, the same phrase was written as 子ーテヴ　カンツレー (ネーテヴ カンツレー in modern katakana) in An Illustrated Vade Mecum of Western Things (西洋画引節用集, Seiyō Ebiki Setsuyōshū).  Notice the shift from ブ to ヴ, an early attempt to represent the “v” sound in “native.”

 

 

Those early transcriptions look quite different from the spellings we recognize today, so my next question was when ネーティヴ itself first appeared.  In 1883, the katakana spelling ネーティヴ turned up in Wilson’s First Reader Pronunciation and Reading (ウヰルソン氏第一リードル音読, Wilson-shi Daiichi Rīdoru Ondoku) during a reading lesson.  Reconstructed in English, the passage would have read:

Lesson 29th.  The Lion.  The lion is often called the king of beasts, and when he is wild and roaming over his native plains in pursuit of his prey, he is feared both by beasts and men.  We cannot well judge how strong and fierce he is from what we see of him in a tame state.

 

 

The spelling turns up again in 1886, in English–Japanese Conversations for Policemen (警官英和会話篇, Keikan Eiwa Kaiwahen), where “Pealse [sic] tell me where is your native country” was written in katakana as「プリース テル ミー ホウェヤー イス ユア ネーティヴ カンツリー」and translated as 足下ノ本國ハ何國デスカ, sokka no honkoku wa nanikoku desu ka.  Like the Wilson reader, this was another pronunciation aid—only here, aimed at helping policemen practice saying “native” in an actual conversational phrase rather than in a reading exercise.

 

 

Which naturally led to the next question:  had ネーティヴ spread beyond language learning?  By 1901, ネーティヴ appeared in Recent History of the English Novel (最近英国小説史, Saikin Eikoku Shōsetsushi) where Thomas Hardy’s 1878 novel The Return of the Native was transliterated as『ゼ・レターン・オブ・ゼ・ネーティヴ』, Ze Retān Obu Ze Nētīvu.  Its use in a work of literary criticism suggests it was becoming a go-to spelling among writers discussing English literature.

So when did dictionaries begin treating ネーティヴ as the standard way to write the word?  One answer comes from the 1905 Middle School English–Japanese Dictionary (中学英和字書, Chūgaku Eiwa Jisho) where it appeared as the headword for native, together with the phrase native country.  By the late Meiji period, ネーティヴ had settled in as the standard spelling in English–Japanese dictionaries.

 

 

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“Native” becomes Japanese

A major turning point came in 1914, when the first entry for ネーチブ appeared in Eizō Katsuya’s (勝屋英造) Dictionary of Foreign Words (外来語辞典, Gairaigo Jiten), together with entries for native country, native tongue, and native place.  I’ve transcribed the entries below directly from the dictionary:

 

ネーチブ (Native) [英]

正しくは「ネーティヴ」。

(1)

• 生来の, shōrai no, inborn
• 天賦の, tenpu no, innate
• 生国の, shōgoku no, of one’s birthplace
• 土着の, dochaku no, indigenous
• 自然の, shizen no, natural
• 天然の, tennen no, naturally occurring

(2)

• 土人, dojin, inhabitant
• 土民, domin, inhabitants
• 内地人, naichijin, mainlander

ネーチブ・カンツリー (Native country) [英]

• 生国, shōgoku, birthplace
• 本国, hongoku, home country

ネーチブ・タング (Native tongue) [英]

• 自国語, jikokugo, language of one’s own country
• 土語, dogo, vernacular

ネーチブ・プレース (Native place) [英]

• 生地, seichi, birthplace
• 故郷, furusato, home village
• 郷土, kyōdo, home district

 

 

That entry for native already included native country, native tongue, and native place.  Even more revealing, the dictionary itself notes that ネーティヴ was the “correct” (正しくは) form.  So by 1914, multiple spellings were already in circulation, and dictionary editors were consciously picking sides.  From the Meiji period through the prewar years, foreign words were often transcribed in several different ways, with native appearing as ネーテイヴ, ネーチヴ, ネイティヴ, and ネーチイブ.  Translators aiming for a more “faithful” transcription of English sometimes preferred “ヴ” over “ブ” for the voiced labiodental fricative [v] sound—a common practice in literary circles throughout the Meiji and Taishō periods.  Unlike the earlier English-learning materials, this dictionary was documenting foreign words that had already entered Japanese.  In other words, native wasn’t just an English word being explained anymore—it had become part of the Japanese language.

Entries in the 1925 English–Japanese Pronouncing Dictionary (英和辞典 : 発音引, Eiwa Jiten: Hatsuon-biki) and the 1932 Great Dictionary of Modern Words (現代語大辞典, Gendaigo Daijiten) show that ネーティヴ had become the standard spelling by the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods, although the alternative spellings ネーチブ, ネーチヴ, ネーテイヴ, ネイティヴ, ネイテイヴ, and ネーテイブ were sometimes used.  The modern spelling ネイティブ was rarer still, appearing only a handful of times during the prewar era.

In 1941, the spelling ネーティヴ appeared in The Banner of the Tōhōkai Advances (東方会の旗は進む, Tōhōkai no Hata wa Susumu).  Here, it was used naturally in political writing within the coined phrase ネーティヴ・コンサーヴァティヴ (native conservative)—suggesting that the word had become productive enough to form new compound expressions rather than just transcribing an English term:

Japan’s native conservatives—the indigenous right wing of Japan—are prepared for a decisive war with Russia, but do not favor war with the United States.  Japan intends to settle the China question solely through war with China. This is a sound way of thinking.  (p. 15)

日本のネーティヴ・コンサーヴァティヴ―日本の土着右翼はロシヤとの決戰は覺悟するが、アメリカとの戰爭は好まない。支那問題は支那との戰爭だけで決めたい積りだ。これは着實な考へ方である。

ネーティヴ was the preferred spelling before the war, but afterward, the word’s history took an unexpected turn.  During the 1950s and 60s, ネイティヴ and its alternative ネイティブ gradually overtook ネーティヴ and ネーティブ.  By the 1970s, ネイティブ had become the dominant spelling and then exploded into mainstream use during the 1980s and 90s.  Despite all this, I still haven’t been able to pin down why ネイ displaced ネー during this period.  One possibility is that American pronunciation—which glides between two vowel sounds in a single syllable (a “diphthong,” like the “ay” in “day”)—was becoming more familiar than the flatter, more clipped British pronunciation of the era.  The shift from ネー to ネイ may have reflected that change.  Another possibility is that greater exposure to spoken English in general encouraged spellings that better captured the diphthong.  For now, I’m still searching for the answer.

 

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The government gets involved in spellings

One major influence on the word’s history came not from dictionaries or publishers, but from government policy.  In 1954, the National Language Council (国語審議会, Kokugo Shingikai) issued a report titled Notation of Loanwords  (外来語の表記, Gairaigo no Hyōki).  The council advised that the sounds “ヴァ” “ヴィ” “ヴ” “ヴェ” “ヴォ” generally be written as “バ” “ビ” “ブ” “ベ” “ボ.”  The recommendation appears as Rule 10 in the section titled Principles for the Notation of Loanwords (外来語表記の原則, Gairaigo Hyōki no Gensoku).  The rule is worth quoting because it shows how much wiggle room the council still allowed:

10. The sounds “fa,” “fi,” “fe,” “fo,” and “va,” “vi,” “vu,” “ve,” “vo” in the original sound shall, as far as possible, be written as “ha,” “hi,” “he,” “ho,” and “ba,” “bi,” “bu,” “be,” “bo.”

Examples:  プラットホーム（platform）ホルマリン（Formalin）バイオリン（violin）ビタミン（Vitamin）ベランダ（veranda）

However, words in which an awareness of the original sound still remains may also be written with “fa,” “fi,” “fe,” “fo,” and “va,” “vi,” “vu,” “ve,” “vo.”

Examples:  ファインプレー（fine-play）フェミニスト（feminist）

ヴェール（veil）ヴォキャブラリー（vocabulary）

(Note)  At the plenary meeting of the National Language Council, this provision gave rise to discussion concerning such questions as whether felt should be written フェルト or ヘルト, and whether film should be written フィルム or フイルム.  The discussion centered on:

(1) how the actual pronunciation of loanwords should be recognized;

(2) how that pronunciation should be represented in kana;

(3) whether, in determining pronunciation or orthography, reality should be reflected or future developments taken into consideration; and

(4) whether the guiding principle should be one of simplification, or one of enriching the sound system of the Japanese language.

 

10． 原音における「ファ」「フィ」「フェ」「フォ」・「ヴァ」「ヴィ」「ヴ」「ヴェ」「ヴォ」の音は、なるべく「ハ」「ヒ」「ヘ」「ホ」「バ」「ビ」「ブ」「ベ」「ボ」と書く。
プラットホーム（platform）ホルマリン（Formalin）バイオリン（violin）ビタミン（Vitamin）ベランダ（veranda）
ただし、原音の意識がなお残っているものは、「ファ」「フィ」「フェ」「フォ」・「ヴァ」「ヴィ」「ヴ」「ヴェ」「ヴォ」と書いてもよい。
ファインプレー（fine-play）フェミニスト（feminist）
ヴェール（veil）ヴォキャブラリー（vocabulary）

（注記）国語審議会総会において、この条項について、たとえば「フェルト」か「ヘルト」か、「フィルム」か「フイルム」かをめぐって、
（1）外来語の発音の事実をどう認めるか、
（2）その事実をどうかなで書き表わすか、
（3）その発音なり表記なりを決定するとき現実どおりにするか将来を考えるか、
（4）その考え方にも簡易化のほうに向かって考えるか、日本語の音を豊富にするほうに向かって考えるかについて論議された。

 

 

Far from prohibiting ヴ, Rule 10 explicitly cited ヴェール (veil) and ヴォキャブラリー (vocabulary) as examples. While the guideline recommended using the バ-row, writers retained the option to use ヴァ, ヴィ, ヴ, ヴェ, and ヴォ when an awareness of the original foreign pronunciation remained strong.  In other words, this was not a case of the バ-row being required and the five ヴ-forms being forbidden.

The council was clearly aware that there was no simple answer to the question of how foreign sounds should be represented in Japanese.  Its discussion of フェルト/ヘルト and フィルム/フイルム shows that these questions were being actively debated rather than simply settled by a blanket rule.

One more rule is worth looking at here.  Rule 7 addresses how to write long vowels—but as you’ll see, a gap was already starting to open up between what the rule recommended and how people were actually writing.

7.  To indicate a long vowel, the long-vowel mark “ー” shall be used.  Vowel letters shall not be written in succession, nor shall “ウ” be used for this purpose.

ボール (ball)　オートバイ (auto-bicycle)

Furthermore, the diphthongs “ei” and “ou” in the original pronunciation shall be regarded as long vowels.

ショー (show)　メーデー (May Day)

[Exceptions]  エイト (eight)　ペイント (paint)

 

7． 長音を示すには、長音符号「ー」を添えて示し、母音字を重ねたり、「ウ」を用いたりしない。
ボール（ball）　オートバイ（auto-bicycle）
なお、原音における二重母音の「エイ」「オウ」は長音とみなす。
ショー（show）　メーデー（May Day）
［例外］エイト（eight）　ペイント（paint）

 

 

The 1954 report doesn’t mention the word native, but its treatment of English /eɪ/ still tells us something about the spelling conventions of the period.  For example, it recommends レーンコート (reenkōto, raincoat) and explicitly states レインコートと書かない (“do not write reinkōto”).  It also gives メーンイベント (mēn ibento, main event) rather than メインイベント (mein ibento).  These examples show the council’s preference for a long vowel (ー) over the sequence エイ to represent /eɪ/—the same convention behind ネーティブ, rather than today’s standard ネイティブ.  Yet usage moved the opposite way.  Over the next two decades, ネイティブ rapidly overtook ネーティブ, and I still can’t explain why.

The discussions around the report reveal a real tension:  should loanword spelling simplify foreign sounds to fit the existing sound system, or should the spelling expand that system to capture foreign pronunciation more faithfully?  Some members pushed for the more faithful approach, but the majority favored going with contemporary usage rather than trying to reshape the spelling system.  This debate helps explain why ヴ stuck around as an acceptable alternative, even while staying outside the mainstream spelling conventions.

The only other time the government formally addressed loanword notation was in 1991, when the government adopted a new National Language Council report titled Notation of Loanwords and issued it as a Cabinet Notice.  The notice defined Table 1 as the kana generally used for writing loanwords and foreign place names and personal names, while Table 2 contained kana for writers who wanted to render a word as close as possible to its original pronunciation or original spelling.  Under this framework, バ, ビ, ブ, ベ, ボ remained the Table 1 forms, while ヴァ, ヴィ, ヴ, ヴェ, ヴォ — along with other kana combinations not traditionally part of standard Japanese phonology, such as イェ・ウィ・ウェ・ウォ | クァ・クィ・ツィ・クェ・クォ | トゥ・グァ・ドゥ | テュ・フュ・ヴュ — were placed in Table 2.  They were available to writers who wanted to approximate the original pronunciation or spelling more closely, but they were not required.

 

 

 

The notice therefore gives the ヴ-based forms a specific role:  they are an option for greater phonetic fidelity, rather than part of the general-use system.  In practice, this creates a kind of hierarchy.  Writers who aren’t specifically trying to represent the original pronunciation closely default to ブ, while ヴ becomes a more deliberate choice.  Rather than settling the question in ヴ’s favor, the 1991 notice arguably reinforced ブ’s position—giving publishers and editors clear institutional cover to keep treating it as the standard.

Although there’s no direct evidence that policy alone drove the shift, the 1954 report—despite having no legal force—functioned as the quasi-official standard in public documents and schools simply because nothing else existed.  It may therefore have influenced writers, translators, and editors to favor ブ over ヴ in loanwords that had previously been written with ヴ.  Rather than ネイティヴ simply fading out over time, writers seem to have increasingly chosen ネイティブ in print until it displaced ネイティヴ as the default spelling.  As this shift took hold, ブ became the familiar default in loanwords, while ヴ remained available as a deliberate, marked choice—still used today, just no longer the automatic choice.

 

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The rise of the “native speaker”

Before getting to how “native speaker” came to be used in Japan in the 1960s, I need to back up and look at its history in English.  The Oxford English Dictionary cites George Perkins Marsh’s 1859 Lectures on the English Language as the earliest use of the noun phrase native speaker, but his use simply refers to a German native speaker’s familiarity with “syntactical principles imperfectly exemplified in French and English” (p. 13).  My search of Google Books, however, turned up several examples that predate Marsh’s book.  One of the most interesting appeared in The Missionary Herald (1848), a collection of letters from overseas missionaries describing local customs and cross-cultural encounters for 19th-century Americans.  In a letter from Amoy (present-day Xiamen), Mr. Pohlman contrasts the speech of Chinese native speakers with the unique voice of the foreign missionary:

The desire of many of the people to hear foreigners, is another loud call for preaching missionaries.  Besides the novelty of a foreigner speaking Chinese, there is the style of delivery, the manner of speaking, which attracts notice.  There is the warm heart, the earnest expression, the striking allusion, the appropriate figure.  There is very little feeling in a native speaker.  It is not unfrequently the case, that an audience will retire under his speaking, but fill up when the missionary speaks.  This has been noticed often at all the places where there are native converts employed as evangelists.

 

 

The Missionary Herald passage suggests native speaker could carry a more general sense back then—a local speaker as opposed to a foreign one—distinct from the technical, competence-based sense in Marsh’s lectures.  The phrase also appeared in academic philology, where grammarians, dialectologists, and language reformers used it to distinguish naturally acquired competence from competence acquired through formal instruction.  Throughout the early to mid-20th century, the term seems to have stayed mostly in academic and pedagogical circles—showing up in grammars, dictionaries, and discussions of language and linguistics.

A search for native speaker in Google Books Ngram Viewer backs that up.  As the Ngram below shows, native speaker barely registers before about 1945.  By contrast, native tongue and native language had already been well established for centuries.  If the phrase itself stayed relatively uncommon in English until after World War II, when—and how—did it end up as simply ネイティブ in Japanese?

 

 

One important catalyst for the term’s rise was the Linguistic Society of America’s (LSA) involvement in mass language instruction during World War II, when it helped revolutionize foreign-language teaching by applying descriptive linguistics to military training.  In early 1941, the LSA partnered with the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and launched the Intensive Language Program (ILP) to develop courses in non-Western languages at American universities.  After the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, the military suddenly needed people who could speak strategically important world languages, so the War Department funded the expansion of the ILP and used its civilian expertise, informant-based methods, and teaching materials to develop the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP).  Instead of memorizing textbook rules, soldiers sat with a native speaker “informant” while a trained linguist guided them to map out and mimic the structure of the targeted spoken language.  The ASTP employed this intensive daily drilling at universities nationwide, with the new audio-driven oral approach becoming widely known—albeit somewhat loosely—as the “Army Method.”  Members of the LSA then created the Spoken Language series—a pioneering set of language textbooks published between 1944 and 1946 under the ACLS’s administration.  The series marked a shift in applied linguistics by prioritizing native-speaker audio recordings, phonetic transcriptions, and structural grammar drills over traditional reading-and-translation methods.

Spoken Japanese, a representative textbook in the series co-authored by Yale linguists Bernard Bloch and Eleanor Jorden, lays out the principles of the new teaching method right in its preface:

A native speaker is the only good source of first-hand knowledge of any language.  Only a native speaker can tell you whether your pronunciation sounds normal, and whether the sentences you use in your Japanese conversations are really Japanese.

The method used in this Manual requires the presence of a native speaker of Japanese at every session of the group.  If no native speaker is available, you can use instead the phonograph records that are supplied with the Method.  Even if you have a native speaker at hand, you can still make good use of the phonograph records for extra drill and for review.  The records can’t answer questions, but they can give you the same word or sentence over and over again in exactly the same way.

The native speaker is referred to in this Manual as the Guide.  The Guide’s job is to act as a model for you to imitate, and to check your pronunciation and usage.  He is not responsible for selecting and arranging the material to be learned, and he should never try to explain Japanese grammar to you.  This is done by the Manual; no other teacher is necessary.  (p. iv)

 

The textbook was produced for the U.S. Armed Forces by the LSA and the ILP of the ACLS, which published it in 1945 as War Department Education Manual No. 561.  It was not a one-off, either—it was part of a much larger wartime language project.  The LSA’s wartime work reshaped postwar language instruction by putting native-speaker pronunciation and speech at the center of language learning—an approach that fed into the audio-lingual method and the language labs still used around the world today.  The other books in the Spoken Language series used very similar language in their prefaces, repeatedly stressing that the native speaker was the only source of authentic speech and essential for learning accurate pronunciation and usage.

 

 

To understand why native speaker spread so quickly after the war, it’s worth stepping back to look at just how big the ILP became after its 1941 launch.  LSA linguists recruited native-speaker “informants,” or “drill-masters,” at leading universities to develop spoken-language materials for twenty-six non-Western languages that had few adequate teaching resources.

In 1943, the ASTP launched, enrolling thousands of military personnel in language courses on 55 university campuses.  Within a single year, the program offered roughly 500 intensive language courses in more than thirty languages, distributing mimeographed and typeset copies of LSA/ILP manuals that emphasized spoken practice directly to student-soldiers.  The U.S. Armed Forces Institute then reformatted and printed the texts as educational manuals, and the War Department distributed the Spoken Language series to soldiers stationed around the world.  Even before the war ended, the ACLS and LSA signed a commercial publishing contract with Henry Holt and Company.  Between 1944 and 1946, Holt reissued the Spoken Language series for the civilian market, expanding it to thirty core language volumes packaged with sets of 78-rpm shellac records for home study.

Until then, the phrase “native speaker” had been mostly a term for linguists and language instructors.  During the war, however, it reached a much wider audience.  From 1943 to 1945, thousands of military personnel encountered the term in the prefaces to the LSA language manuals.  After the war, civilian learners met the same idea in the ACLS/LSA Spoken Language series, which stressed the importance of native-speaker “Guides” for checking pronunciation and usage.  Growing international travel in the 1950s and 60s, plus the spread of language labs in American schools, likely put the term in front of even more learners.  Native-speaker recordings also became a familiar part of language study, helping to turn native speaker from a specialist’s term into an everyday expression.

 

A personal note:

When I began studying Japanese at Cornell University in 1988, Eleanor Jorden had only recently retired after teaching there for nearly two decades.  My teachers used her textbook Japanese: The Spoken Language, written entirely in romaji without kana or kanji.  Spending hours in the language lab listening to native Japanese speakers and repeating their sentences was also a big part of the course.  This was my first experience with the Yale “audiolingual” method, and it helped me learn how to pronounce difficult Japanese sounds like つ, が, を, ん, and ら・り・る・れ・ろ.  When I continued studying Japanese as a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley, I encountered a much more traditional approach that emphasized kanji, vocabulary lists, grammar, and reading comprehension.  Looking back, I’m really glad I encountered Jorden’s oral-first method before diving into the conventional, text-centered yakudoku approach!

 

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“Native speaker” spreads globally

At this point, I stepped back and asked what all this circumstantial evidence was actually pointing toward.  During the 1940s, native speaker became a central concept in audio-focused language teaching in the U.S.  The War Department distributed the new oral-based instruction materials to ASTP soldiers on university campuses across the U.S. and at overseas bases.  The Spoken Language series, published as the war ended, pushed the term further into the civilian market, and a postwar boom in linguistics publications and a widening market for language learners carried it the rest of the way into mainstream use.

If I was right, I figured, the Google Books Ngram Viewer would show the term rising in other countries too, as the English phrase spread abroad and got translated into other languages.  I also expected a delay, since it would take time for the English phrase to catch on in other languages.  The Ngram results matched that expectation surprisingly well.  Searches in other languages show the same steep postwar rise, lagging ten to twenty years behind the English-language curve.  Here, British English noticeably lags behind American English, with German Muttersprachler, Russian носитель языка, and Spanish hablante nativo following behind.  The French locuteur natif comes last and stays largely confined to linguistic and language-teaching contexts even after it begins to rise.

 

Japan’s closest equivalent to Google Books Ngram Viewer is the Ngram Viewer of the National Diet Library (NDL), one of the largest libraries in the world.  As you can see from the results for ネイティヴスピーカー and ネイティブスピーカー, the usage curves rise more slowly and later than “native speaker” did in Western languages.  Although the NDL Ngram Viewer normally covers the period from 1860 to 2022, every search I ran for the various katakana spellings of native speaker came back with truncated axes beginning in 1962.  In other words, the Ngram database doesn’t seem to have any earlier published examples.

When I added the English phrase to the graph (Figure 1), it turned out to be more common in published sources than its Japanese forms—until ネイティブスピーカー finally overtook it in 1987 and soared into heavy use during the 1990s.  I’ve also included 母国語話者 (bokokugo washa) and 母語話者 (bogo washa) (Figure 2), which emerged during the 1970s as alternatives to ネイティブスピーカー.  Around 1994, 母語話者 overtook ネイティブスピーカー in the NDL corpus.

As Figure 3 shows, though, ネイティブ seems to have stayed the preferred term—even after dropping its スピーカー half—despite the rise of 母語話者.  Even more telling:  ネイティブスピーカー could be shortened to just ネイティブ while still keeping its English-derived meaning of “native speaker,” rather than sliding back to the older sense of “native” or “indigenous inhabitant.”  That kind of shortening tends to happen once a term is familiar enough that readers don’t need the full phrase to understand it.

 

 

 

 

Well, there you have it…  I started with what seemed like a simple question—why does Japanese have two spellings for “native”?—and ended up on a much longer trail:  from the first English dictionaries published in Japan, through native’s slow transformation into a Japanese loanword, to the eventual rise of native speaker as a term in its own right.

Along the way, I found that the two stories were tangled together in ways I hadn’t expected.  Native had been circulating in Japanese for decades before native speaker even became common in English—and it was the explosion of modern language teaching during and after World War II that transformed the latter.  As language learning spread around the world, so did the idea of the “native speaker,” eventually making its way into Japanese.

But I still haven’t reached the end of the trail.  In the next post, I’ll go back to the early 20th century and follow native speaker through English- and Japanese-language books, periodicals, and other materials published in Japan from the 1910s to the 1950s.  I’ll look at the moments when the English phrase was inserted as code-switching—swapping in an English term mid-sentence—into Japanese writing because there was no obvious Japanese equivalent, and then at how it finally began appearing in katakana in 1961.  From there, I’ll follow its growing presence in English-learning books and classrooms through the 1960s and 70s, and then look at how it began spreading beyond the world of language education.  The rise of the eikaiwa industry seems to have played a big role here, along with government policies that brought more foreign teachers into Japanese schools, and the media coverage that followed both.  I haven’t finished tracing that part of the story yet, so I’m curious to see where the evidence leads.

And that still won’t be the end of the story.  In a third post, I’ll look at what happened after ネイティブスピーカー became familiar enough to be shortened to ネイティブ in everyday speech and writing—and how that shortened form eventually developed a life of its own in Japanese, taking on meanings and uses that go far beyond the original English phrase.

 

 

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References

• Hori, Tatsunosuke, ed. A Pocket Dictionary of the English and Japanese Language.  Edo: publisher unknown, 1862.  Digital facsimile of the copy held by Tenri Central Library. Rikkyo University Library Digital Library, https://library.rikkyo.ac.jp/digitallibrary/shuchinjisho/contents/con_01.html.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Hori, Tatsunosuke, ed. A Pocket Dictionary of the English and Japanese Language.  2nd rev. ed.  Edo: Kuratayaseiemon, 1867.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/870101.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Umeura, Motoyoshi, trans. A Popular Vocabulary of English, vol. 1. Takuzenkyo, 1871.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/870172.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Inoue, Renpei, comp. An Illustrated Vade Mecum of Western Things, Part 2.  Hōbundō, 1872.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/870160.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Nakamura, Gan, trans. Wilson’s First Reader: Pronunciation and Reading.  Reviewed by Kōgyokusha.  Nakamura Gan et al., 1883.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/870634.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• English–Japanese Conversations for Policemen. Suhara Tetsuji, 1886.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/871458.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Nakajima, Shigeichi. Recent History of the English Novel.  Compendium of Famous Works, Literary Education Series, no. 12.  Tokyo:  Tokyo Semmon Gakkō Shuppanbu, 1901.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/871639.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Noma, M., comp. An English-Japanese Dictionary for Middle Schools.  Tokyo: Tōundō and Shiubunkwan, 1905.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/870171.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Katsuya, Eizō, comp. Dictionary of Foreign Words, with an appendix, A Brief Explanation of New Words and Myths.  Nishōdō Shoten, 1914.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/969165.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Hotta, Sōji. English–Japanese Pronouncing Dictionary.  Dai Nihon Kyōiku Tsūshinsha, 1925.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/915430.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Fujimura, Tsukuru, and Chiba Tsutomu, eds. Great Dictionary of Modern Words.  Isshinsha, 1932.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1188330.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Nakano, Seigō. The Banner of the Tōhōkai Advances.  Tokyo Kōenkai Shuppanbu, 1941.  National Diet Library Digital Collections, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1270733.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Ministry of Education. National Language Series No. 27: Materials on the Notation of Loanwords.  Meiji Tosho Shuppan, 1955.  Agency for Cultural Affairs, https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/series/27/27.html.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Notice on the Notation of Loanwords (Cabinet Notice No. 2, June 28, 1991).  Agency for Cultural Affairs, https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kijun/naikaku/gairai/.  Accessed August 11, 2026.
• Bloch, Bernard, and Eleanor Harz Jorden, with Mikiso Hane, Toshio Kono, and others.  Spoken Japanese: Basic Course, Units 1–12.  War Department Education Manual 561.  Washington, D.C.:  War Department, for the United States Armed Forces Institute, in cooperation with the Linguistic Society of America and the Intensive Language Program, American Council of Learned Societies, 1945.  Google Books, https://www.google.co.jp/books/edition/War_Department_Education_Manual/44Om9O1RB28C.  Accessed July 22, 2026.
• Marsh, George P. Lectures on the English Language.  New York: C. Scribner, 1859.  Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=W5QFAAAAQAAJ&oe=UTF-8.  Accessed July 25, 2026.
• The Missionary Herald, vol. 44, no. 3 (March 1848).  Boston: Press of T. R. Marvin, 1848.  Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/sim_missionary-herald_1848-03_44_3.  Accessed July 25, 2026.
• Moulton, William G. Linguistics and Language Teaching in the United States, 1940–1960.  Offprint from Trends in European and American Linguistics. Washington, D.C.:  U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962.  ERIC, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED038879.pdf.  Accessed July 25, 2026.

 

 

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