Since its apparition in the late nineteenth century, the ‘native speaker’ has appeared to be both a liberating and a suffocant concept in applied linguistics. Over divers decades Alan Davies contested the concept for the barrier it poses for language learners, who can never attain native speakerhood seeing factors of birth and education that end in unacceptable bias and restricted chances that are not allowed in most aspects of citizenship or employment, but have managed to persevere where language is concerned. Yet native and non-native speakerhood is an authentic part of our experience and perception, which it appears illusory to negate seeing its disagreeable political consequences. This paper revises the concept of native speaker in the light of current theories of extended and distributed cognition, which permits to redefine it in corporeal and intrapersonal terms, saving its liberating aspects, which have not been trivial, while supplying a stable basis for dismissing it in those contexts where it is repressive.