In his philosophical novel, Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche (1883–85), famously wrote, ‘God is dead,’ signifying that God is no longer credible as an absolute moral compass. Over a century later, Paikeday (1985), proclaimed that The native speaker is dead! in his book title, implying that the native speaker as the arbiter of what is correct in a language is obsolete. This paper discusses this complex, contentious ideological issue from language assessment and sociolinguistic standpoints against the backdrop of global Englishes. After highlighting difficulties identifying standard language norms, we discuss the practical need of having some assessment standard against which to evaluate language performance. Proposals as to what that standard should be are then critiqued in view of ways that second language proficiency has been operationalized in assessment systems. Next, we argue against vilifying those who use the term ‘native speaker’ and consider terminological problems introduced by some reconceptualizing efforts. We argue that we have a long way to go as a field before reaching a truly post-native speaker era, which would seem to be a reasonable aspiration for most, but not necessarily all contexts, and propose recommendations for addressing pressing research problems. This includes standardizing terminology to incorporate semantically transparent terms, exploring assessment alternatives that focus more on language use than standard language adherence, improving scoring systems to remove nativeness from the equation when inappropriate, and acknowledging a place for accuracy-focused research within a broad tent of applied linguistics research traditions.

中文翻译：

---

纠正母语者辩论中的平衡：评估标准、标准语言和暴露双重标准

在他的哲学小说查拉图斯特拉如是说，尼采（1883-85 年）著名地写道，“上帝已死”，表明上帝不再是一个绝对的道德指南针。一个多世纪后，Paikeday (1985) 宣称母语者已死！在他的书名中，暗示母语者作为语言正确性的仲裁者已经过时了。本文在全球英语的背景下，从语言评估和社会语言学的角度讨论了这个复杂的、有争议的意识形态问题。在强调了识别标准语言规范的困难之后，我们讨论了制定一些评估标准来评估语言表现的实际需求。鉴于第二语言能力在评估系统中的运作方式，有关该标准应该是什么的建议会受到批评。接下来，我们反对诋毁那些使用“母语人士”一词的人，并考虑一些重新概念化努力引入的术语问题。我们认为，作为一个领域，在进入真正的后母语时代之前，我们还有很长的路要走，这对于大多数人来说似乎是一个合理的愿望，但不一定是所有情况，并就解决紧迫的研究问题提出建议。这包括将术语标准化以包含语义透明的术语，探索更多关注语言使用而不是标准语言依从性的评估替代方案，改进评分系统以在不适当的情况下从等式中消除本地性，并承认在广泛的范围内进行以准确性为重点的研究的位置应用语言学研究传统。