To employ the designations "native speaker" and "native language" unreflectively is to engage in a gesture of othering that operates on an axis of empowerment and disempow-erment. The person born into the matrix of nation and language can often invoke, in con-versations with someone foreign to that matrix, the notion of a birthright of linguistic au-thority. Under the magnification of reflective linguistic inquiry, however, the borderline between L1 and L2 speakers shows itself to be constructed upon layers of misprision and folkloric concepts of language. Indeed, there is nothing intrinsically linguistic about that borderline of native language nationality; it is erected by psychological, social, political, historical, and cultural anxieties that have been projected upon language. This presentation examines the ideological legacy of the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of "mother tongue" and "native speaker" by historicizing their linguistic de-velopment. It shows how the early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguis-tic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race. This ideology invented myths of congenital communities that configured the national language in a symbiotic matrix between body and physical environment and as the ethnic and cor-poreal ownership of national identity and local organic nature. These ethno-nationalist gestures informed the philology of the early modern era and generated arboreal and gene-alogical models of language, culminating most divisively in the race conscious discourse of the Indo-European hypothesis of the 19th century. The philosophical theories of organ-icism also contributed to these ideologies. The fundamentally nationalist conflation of race and language was and is the catalyst for subsequent permutations of ethnolinguistic discrimination, which continue today. Scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to over-extend biological metaphors in the study of language, as these can encourage, however surreptitiously, genetic and racial impressions of language. Thomas Paul Bonfiglio, University of Richmond Multilingual, 2.0? Multilingualism Invented (Moderated by Prof. Peter Ecke, Department of German Studies) Sunday, 04/15/2012 9:00-11:00am