Decentering the colonial native speaker

In this article, we advocate a SPEAKERHOOD STUDIES approach as part of an effort to decenter the ‘native speaker’ in linguistics. Recent critiques of native-speakerhood problematize this construct's links to essentializing discourses born of ethnolinguistic nationalism and colonialism and advocate for more specific and less reductionist approaches to describing speakers in linguistics (e.g. Babel & Grammon 2021, Birkeland et al. 2024, Cheng et al. 2021). We argue that it is important to consider—indeed, to center—conceptions of speakerhood in multilingual, transnational communities that offer a contrast to discourses centered on language purism, nationalism, and standard language ideologies. We examine data from speakers of Quechua, analyzing ways in which their ideologies of speakerhood diverge from naturalized scientific discourses in linguistics, in order to demonstrate the possibilities and the stakes of a speakerhood studies approach.