Both the concept of a “native speaker/signer” and the term itself have been critiqued and
problematized across fields such as linguistic anthropology, second language acquisition,
and English language teaching. However, within less peripheralized disciplines of
linguistics, this term is often used uncritically, with some disciplines centering the behavior
and knowledge of “native speakers” as the main object of inquiry. We argue that the term
“native speaker/signer” is a colonial analytic that reifies the connection between named …