How have you been? You may have been trying to improve your foreign language proficiency during the summer vacation. In particular, gaining a better competence in English must be of interest to many of you. According to Ethnologue, a language reference published by SIL International, there are over 1.2 billion people who speak English. The majority of them are those who speak English as a second or foreign language. English is, I believe, not exclusively owned by those who speak it as a first language. However, the ideology that English belongs to so called ‘native English speakers’ still remains deep-seated.
I have been learning Mandarin Chinese. Occasionally, I am called by Chinese people ‘taijun (太君)’. Despite the absence of a consensus on its definition, this word was used in the past to refer to Japanese soldiers and is today used to refer to Japanese people jokingly. I speculate that some Chinese people use the word innocently or they may use it to express friendliness towards me. However, I am not a soldier and I do not like to be referred to by words that are associated with wars. I wish, therefore, that Chinese people just called me a ‘Japanese’.
The Japanese language also has a controversial word, gaijin (外人). Even if Japanese people use this word without intending to discriminate foreigners in Japan, some non-Japanese nationals who speak Japanese feel annoyed by this word. Do you think gaijin is just an abbreviation of gaikokujin (外国人)? Or is gaijin a term that connotes xenophobia? To make Japanese society more inclusive, Japanese people should refrain from using Japanese words that possibly cause foreigners in Japan to feel alienated.
Is a language owned exclusively by those who speak it as a first language? Do those who speak it as a second or foreign language have no right to have a say? What kind of conditions are necessary to become a “collective owner” of the language and to be a “legitimate commentator” about the language? If you are trying to enhance your foreign language proficiency, these questions are for you. Let’s think about them.