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nativeness

nativeness

7.7
How much speech or writing sounds like someone who grew up speaking the language
  • noun
  • /ˈneɪtɪvnəs/
  • Specialized
translation icon : naturalidad
  • Six native English listeners judged the nativeness of the bilingual speakers.

Examples

  • Listeners were instructed to judge the degree of nativeness of the speaker.

    Academic text (2011)
  • For their language course, students were evaluated on the nativeness of their spoken English.

  • The linguist analyzed the nativeness of the text to assess its authenticity.

  • The research focused on how nativeness affects the perception of translation quality.

Antonyms

4.8

A person who does not speak a language they learned first

How Fluent

nativeness
  • Specialized
7.7
linguistic performance
  • Specialized
7.2
disfluency
  • Specialized
1 8.9

Surface Forms

nativeness singular
nativenesses plural

Morphology

nativeness = native (transparent) = native + ness

Formed by adding '-ness' to 'native' to indicate a quality; the extension to 'native-like' language quality follows the usual pattern of '-ness' forming abstract nouns.

Etymology

Nativeness comes from native, which goes back to the Latin nativus, meaning 'born'. A helpful way to remember the language sense is to think how much speech or writing sounds like it was 'born' from a native speaker, so nativeness means sounding like a native.