ABSTRACT
The term ‘new speaker’, while relatively to English-language terminology, already existed in Galician as the folk term neofalantes, and the Basque term euskaldunberri was already being used to refer to second language speakers who acquired Basque through formal education, either as children or adults. The contemporary rise of the ‘new speaker’ profile in the context of European minority languages has come to represent a ‘challenging opportunity’. Research on new speakers of minority languages is also linked to debates around taken-for-granted notions such as ‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’. A central area of concern for research into new speakers is the emergence of tensions between different speakers over the linguistic legitimacy, authority and authenticity that surround their language learning and use. New conceptualisations of identity can allow us to take into account the emergence of new types of speakers with a sometimes very different set of cultural values to the native speaker community.
