native speakernoun [ C ]
uk/ˌneɪ.tɪv ˈspiː.kər/us/ˌneɪ.t̬ɪv ˈspiː.kɚ/B2 someone who has spoken a particular language since they were a baby, rather than having learned it as a child or adult:
All our teachers are native speakers of English.
a native-speaker dictionary
More examples
- He is a native speaker of Russian.
- Native speakers just learn these idioms naturally.
- I know I'll never speak French like a native speaker.
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
Using other languages
- anglophone
- code switching
- diglossia
- first language
- interpret
- linguist
- lusophone
- machine translation
- modern languages
- monolingual
- multilingual
- non-native speaker
- pinyin
- polyglot
- rendering
- speak
- translate
- translation
- trilingual
- word
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