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Glite Dictionary
🌏 To adopt local ways 💻 To use native code
to go native

to go native

2 8.1
To live like local people when you are in another country
  • phrasal verb
translation icon : adaptarse
  • "My, um, failures in certain overseas endeavors were due, in part, I've come to believe, to the pressures to, as it were, go native.

Examples

  • You go native, but then stop functioning as a social scientist.

    Academic text (1992)

  • Maybe I was going native.

    Fiction book (1997)

  • Perhaps it's my personal history that prevented me from going native.

    Academic text (2008)

  • On the whole, Sandy tended to go native, to throw herself as entirely as possible into learning the customs, history, cuisine, furniture, and architecture.

    Fiction book (1995)

  • It wasn't that I had "gone native" and completely abandoned my roots.

    Blog text (3)

  • In the past in anthropology, if a researcher "went native," it doomed him academically.

    Academic text (1992)

  • Thus for me, "going native" achieved a breakthrough to an altogether different worldview, foreign to academia.

    Academic text (1992)

  • While living in Thailand, many travelers choose to go native by learning the language and participating in local traditions.

  • As she spent more time in the village, she began to go native, adopting the local customs and cuisine.

  • To better understand the culture, he decided to go native and immerse himself fully in life with the locals.

Synonyms

to assimilate
vsto go native
77 6.1

Become similar to other people by joining their group and learning their customs

is about adopting local customs while abroad rather than full group integration
to acculturate
vsto go native
  • Specialized
1 8.2

Learn and use the customs and ways of another group

is focused on adopting local customs while living abroad rather than broad cultural change

Antonyms

to keep one's distance (from)
12 4.2

To stay away from people or things to avoid close contact

How Integrated

to integrate
75 4.1
to go native
2 8.1
to make like a tourist
  • Informal
7.7

Surface Forms

go native infinitive
went native past
gone native past participle
going native present participle
go natives third person singular

Morphology

go + native

The meaning — to switch or become "native" in a computing sense — follows directly from combining 'go' (become) with 'native' (platform-specific). Although the computing sense is somewhat technical, the construction is compositional and expresses a straightforward change of state that a B1 learner who knows both words can infer.

Etymology

Go native may come from older times when foreign visitors decided to live with local people; they would go and behave like the native community, so the phrase now means 'to adopt the customs of the locals'.