Abstract
This article examines the rhetoric of national character as deployed in the concept of the English ‘native speaker’. The emergence of the concept and its attendant discourse is analyzed through a corpus of texts that extends from the mid-19th century to just after World War I, including not only linguistic classics but also collections of lesser known periodical articles. As the analysis shows, the second half of the 19th century was a period in which linguists started to think differently about languages and their speakers. The concept of the native speaker provided an important way of labeling a particular linguistic identity and drawing boundaries between some speakers and others, crucially connected to nationalism and Anglo-Saxonism; as such, it has had repercussions up to the present day, as the debate surrounding the native speaker in the World Englishes context shows.
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