Speaking ‘good English’: Italian university students’ relationship with nativeness and non-nativeness

Despite its status as the global lingua franca, the English language still seems to ‘belong’ to a minority of its speakers – those who are defined and recognised as ‘natives’ (NS). NS are seen as an ideal benchmark for language competence at all levels and are thus accorded greater prestige compared to non-native speakers (NNS; Dragojevic et al., 2021). In the past decade, there seems to have been an increase in conflict between NS and NNS in anglophone countries, where the English language has become a defining part of NS’s national identity (as emerging from Sebba, 2017 and Musolff, 2018). On the other hand, NNS themselves seem to have internalised the notion that speaking ‘good English’ entails a strong comparison with NS (Piller, 2002); this, however, paints learners as “defective native speaker” (Cook, 2002: 20) unless they shed their own non-native identity and accent (Jenkins, 2009). This paper has the goal to explore the complex relationship that Italian learners of English have with the nebulous figure of the NS, employing interviews so as to allow them to narrate their experiences and express their individual and collective identities (De Fina, 2015). University students from different curricula were chosen as the main respondents due to the variety in their language needs and goals: it was hypothesised that they may thus represent different attitudes towards the ‘sounding native’ ideal. The corpus obtained from the interviews was analysed with the Grounded Theory Method (Glaser and Strauss 1967/1999) to observe the recurring themes emerging from the narratives; they were later related to subjects' changing self-positioning, according to Harré’s Positioning Theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1998), and link the textual dimension with social practices and ideological implications (Fairclough, 1995; Van Dijk, 1993). A stark difference appears in the respondents’ definition of NS and proficient learners, which seems to correspond to a strict NS-NNS binary. Surprisingly, however, conflict does not appear to be relegated to these categories: many respondents stressed a type of ‘Us vs. Them’ distinction (van Dijk, 1998) with other Italian learners who were described as ‘stereotypically Italian-sounding’ and thus unskilled, ultimately reinforcing the perceived need to shed one’s own NNS identity to be recognised as a successful learner.