informant

Etymology

inform + -ant

noun

1. One who relays confidential information to someone, especially to the police; an informer.
   One of her chief informants is Alicent’s handmaiden Talya (Alexis Rabin), whose inside info runs so deep that she’s the first to catch wind of Viserys’ death. October 16, 2022, Jenna Scherer, “An enticing House Of The Dragon crowns Westeros' new ruler”, in AV Club
2. (linguistics) A native speaker who acts as a linguistic reference for a language being studied. The informant demonstrates native pronunciation, provides grammaticality judgments regarding linguistic well-formedness, and may also explain cultural references and other important contextual information.
   The only material the linguist has to begin with are the informant's grammatical utterances in the target language pronounced arbitrarily in a natural or assigned communicative situation or stimulated artificially by the investigator. 1977, A. E. Kibrik, The methodology of field investigations in linguistics
   The informant learns his language by formal training and, more importantly, by constant exposure to its use. He cannot repeat to the linguist what he has never seen or heard. 2003, Sergei Nirenburg, H. L. Somers, Yorick Wilks, Readings in machine translation, page 116