In pursuing Widdowson’s line of reasoning, I want to argue that, with the advance of English as a world language, the whole idea of ‘native speaker’ has been rendered somewhat blurred, if not hopelessly meaningless—except perhaps in an ideological sense which, incidentally, was always there, although seldom noticed (Rajagopalan 1997), and hence increasingly questionable as far as ELT practices are concerned. A logical corollary to Widdowson’s thesis is this. In its emerging role as a world language, English has no native speakers. Now, this is no doubt a bold claim, and to the extent that it can survive critical scrutiny, it will have far-reaching consequences not only for ELT, but also for the way we have become accustomed to thinking about natural languages.