From Native Speaker Authority to Algorithmic Authority: A Decolonial Analysis of Algorithmic Authority and Linguistic Legitimacy

Abstract

The decolonial critique of English Language Teaching has long described native-speakerism as a colonial ideology. A similar kind of authority is emerging, unperceived, unquestioned, and rationalised by the idea of technology as neutral, as AI-driven tools are increasingly deployed in EFL classrooms to assess language, provide feedback, and teach writing. The paper introduces the notion of algorithmic recolonisation to describe the transfer of authority from the biological native speaker to the computational program. Drawing upon a decolonial and critical post-humanist framework, this paper undertakes a comparative conceptual analysis to explore the structural parallels between native-speaker authority and algorithmic authority across four shared mechanisms: invisibility, idealisation, marginalisation of peripheral voices, and institutional legitimisation. It claims that AI systems are mostly trained on Western English data and reproduce the epistemic hierarchy marked by native-speakerism, now encoded rather than embodied. The paper calls for a critical and ideologically conscious pedagogy, one neither lulled by techno-utopianism nor dismissive of AI’s genuine affordances. It argues that without such vigilance, the decolonised classroom and the algorithmically governed classroom risk becoming indistinguishable.