Hi everyone!

I'm Ariadne Miranda, a Panamanian-American who fell in love with linguistics many years ago. I got to this field a little bit by accident. When I was thinking about what to study, I said to my dad that I wanted to be a teacher. My dad was a self-made pragmatic man who was very successful in business. He looked at me and said, "Of course you can, but you need to know that you will starve." I was young and took his words seriously, so I ended up majoring in business and management so that I would not starve to death.

Years later, when I did not know what to do with my life, I ran into a newspaper ad for an organization searching for a volunteer English as a Second Language instructor for a group of immigrants in Tampa. This immediately appealed to me, even though I did not have any formal training in language instruction. I fell in love with my students and teaching right away. I knew that this being the United States, there was probably a field of study related to teaching languages to speakers of other languages, and this is how I enrolled in a master's program at USF in Applied Linguistics. I taught international students academic English for over 20 years at USF and loved every minute of it! Years later, the program closed down, and I found myself again at a crossroads. What to do with my skills and experience? This is how the AM Communication Collective was born. I have a deep passion for languages and teaching, and now I have the outlet to create language learning experiences, courses, and more to help people in our community learn Spanish (and also English), even though my focus right now is Spanish.

Now, the reason for this post.

I grew up in Panama. Spanish was my first language. I teach both English and Spanish. By every traditional definition, I could call myself a "native speaker" of Spanish. And I choose not to.

The term native speaker seems innocent enough, right? When we hear it, we imagine someone who was born in a language community speaking a language that they learned as their first, often perfectly. However, in the field of linguistics, this term is a bit problematic.

For one thing, it assumes that someone who learned a language as their first language automatically has better command of it than someone who learned it as an additional one. You can see how this is often not true. How many people have you met who speak English, for instance, as their first language but don't have the vocabulary or the grammatical awareness to teach it? Being born into a language does not make you an expert in it.

The term also creates a hierarchy of speakers. It puts "native" speakers at the top with everyone else below. And here is where it gets personal for me: I experience both sides of this hierarchy. In Spanish, I could claim "native speaker" status without question. But when I teach English, people might hear my accent or learn my background and assume I'm not a native speaker of English, despite having taught it at the university level for over two decades. The same person, two languages, and the label works completely differently depending on who is looking. That double standard tells you the label is not really about language. It is about who gets to belong.

Because at the end of the day, language is about belonging. It is how we connect, how we build community, how we find our people. When I speak Spanish, I belong. I am home. No one questions it. But when I speak English, a language I have taught, studied, and lived in for decades, that belonging can be taken from me with a single raised eyebrow or a "Where are you from?" That is what the native speaker framework does. It does not just rank languages. It decides who gets to belong and who has to keep proving that they do.

More importantly perhaps, this term denies the reality of multilingualism. While in some countries like the United States monolingualism may be the norm, in the world multilingualism reigns supreme. In fact, English has many more non-native speakers (another term I do not like) than native ones. In countries like India, South Africa, Switzerland, and even my home country of Panama, people grow up navigating multiple languages as a normal part of daily life. The "native speaker" model, built around the idea of one person and one language, simply does not reflect how most of the world communicates.

And the consequences of this framework are not just personal. They are structural. Research consistently shows that accent bias affects hiring decisions, with the strongest effects falling on speakers from marginalized communities. A 2024 study published in Nature found that even AI language models replicate this prejudice, assigning lower-status jobs and harsher legal outcomes to people based solely on how they sound. Meanwhile, initiatives like the Accentism Project at Manchester Metropolitan University are documenting stories of language-based discrimination and calling accent prejudice "one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination." The good news? Research also shows that when people are exposed to accent diversity and educated about these biases, prejudice goes down. Awareness matters.

This is not just about hurt feelings. It is about hiring decisions, legal outcomes, educational access, and who gets to be seen as credible, competent, and professional. The "native speaker" label feeds directly into these systems.

What Can We Use Instead of "Native Speaker"?

I say: I'm multilingual. I speak Spanish, English, and Italian. I teach both Spanish and English.

Other options that linguists and educators are embracing include proficient speaker, expert speaker, or L1 speaker when you need to indicate order of acquisition without implying that one language is superior to another. Or, most simply: "I speak Spanish." No qualifier needed. Your proficiency is a spectrum, not a birthright.

The point is not to find the perfect replacement word. The point is to stop using a framework that ranks people's languages and tells some speakers that they belong more than others.

This is exactly why, at the AM Communication Collective, we do not rank languages or speakers. We help people communicate with confidence in the languages they carry with them. Because your voice, all of your voices, are already enough.

Speak boldly. Bilingually.

Ariadne Miranda, Ph.D. Founder, AM Communication Collective www.amcommunicationcollective.com

References

Drummond, R. & Carrie, E. The Accentism Project. Manchester Metropolitan University & University of Essex. https://accentism.org

Hofmann, V., Kalluri, P. R., Jurafsky, D., & King, S. (2024). AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect. Nature, 633, 147–154. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5