A passive speaker (also referred to as a receptive bilingual or passive bilingual) is a
category of speaker who has had enough exposure to a language in childhood to have a
native-like comprehension of it, but has little or no active command of it. Passive fluency is often brought about by being raised in one language (which becomes the person's passive language) and being schooled in another language (which becomes the person's native language).
Such speakers are especially common in
language shift
Language shift, also known as language transfer, language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived ...
communities where speakers of a declining language do not acquire active competence. For example, around 10% of the
Ainu people
The Ainu are an Indigenous peoples, indigenous ethnic group who reside in northern Japan and southeastern Russia, including Hokkaido and the Tōhoku region of Honshu, as well as the land surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, such as Sakhalin, the Ku ...
who speak the language are considered passive speakers. Passive speakers are often targeted in
language revival
Language revitalization, also referred to as language revival or reversing language shift, is an attempt to halt or reverse the decline of a language or to revive an extinct one. Those involved can include linguists, cultural or community group ...
efforts to increase the number of speakers of a language quickly, as they are likely to gain active and near-native speaking skills more quickly than those with no knowledge of the language. They are also found in areas where people grow up hearing another language outside their family with no formal education.
Language attitudes
A more common term for the phenomenon is 'passive bilingualism'.
François Grosjean argues that there has been a monolingual bias regarding who is considered a 'bilingual' in which people who do not have equal competence in all their languages are judged as not speaking properly. 'Balanced bilinguals' are, in fact, very rare. One's fluency as a bilingual in a language is domain-specific: it depends on what each language is used for.
That means that speakers may not admit to their fluency in their passive language although there are social (extralinguistic) factors that underlie their different competencies.
See also
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Heritage speaker
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Home language
A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' or ''mother tongue'' refers ...
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School language
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Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and s ...
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Mantinc el català
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Multilingualism
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...
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Mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelli ...
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Speech repetition
250px, Children copy with their own mouths the words spoken by the mouths of those around them. That enables them to learn the pronunciation of words not already in their vocabulary.
Speech repetition occurs when individuals speech, speak the so ...
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Literary Arabic
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Passive speaker (language)
Bilingualism
Language acquisition
Multilingualism
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