ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the notion of Japanese native speaker has been constructed by examining various expressions related to both native and non-native speakers of Japanese and other languages, as well as the teaching of these languages. In 2002, the Agency of Cultural Affairs' (ACA's) survey on the national language asked about "Japanese people's proficiency in the national language"', but the wording of the question in the 2011 survey had changed to "Japanese people's Japanese language proficiency". It is a common practice to shorten words in Japanese—especially katakana words, which tend to be long—and this is in fact one of the topics that was found to be a trend in ACA's 2014 survey on the national language. While the kanji word for native speaker is written using four characters, the katakana word is often shortened to "native" in casual contexts.
