mother tongue

plural mother tongues

1. The language one first learned; the language one grew up with; one's native language.

   His mother tongue is a relatively conservative dialect of Aramaic.

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   Our conversation was entirely in Malay, as that is the official language here, and in fact the mother-tongue and only language of the controlleur, who is a native-born half-breed.

   1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 384

   One young Tamil teacher had assimilated the sound-system of English so thoroughly to that of his mother-tongue that none of the Chinese and Malay children understood him.

   1958, Anthony Burgess, The Enemy in the Blanket (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 277

   Throughout their long history as a minority, Anglo-Indians learned their "father tongue" but were indifferent to their "mother tongue," an indigenous Indian language.

   1973, Noel Pitts Gist, Roy Dean Wright, Marginality and Identity, →ISBN

   A father tongue is a foreign language, therefore English is a foreign language not a mother tongue.

   1993, Janice Rae Williamson, Sounding differences: conversations with seventeen Canadian women writers, →ISBN

   Ramanujan has also argued that many Hindu men have both a mother tongue (the everyday language, such as Tamil, spoken by women downstairs, in the back, in the kitchen) and a father tongue (once Sanskrit, more recently English, the literary lingua franca spoken—or at least discussed—by men in the front rooms).

   2011, Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider, →ISBN, page 144

   Synonyms: first language, mother language, native language, native tongue, L1 · Antonyms: father tongue

2. The language spoken by one’s ancestors.
3. The language spoken by one's mother, when it differs from that spoken by one's father.

   Questions about respondents' place of birth, their parents' place of birth, nativity, and language use (called “mother tongue” and “father tongue”) were added to the Census between 1850 and 1960.

   2006, Yo Jackson, Encyclopedia of Multicultural Psychology, →ISBN

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   Informed by the experience of other parents who had successfully raised their children with more than one language and our own observations, we knew clearly that Léandre and Dominique's mother tongue and father tongue would not have a chance without deliberate 'control' of their linguistic environment.

   2008 -, Xiao-Lei Wang, Growing Up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven, →ISBN, page 58

   Antonyms: father tongue

4. Informal speech, as opposed to educated language.

   We learn the father tongue to prove we have outgrown the mother tongue.

   1992, Gail B. Griffin, Calling : essays on teaching in the mother tongue, page 169

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   The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.

   1854, Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

   In each case, we are reborn -- a fact that explains Thoreau's preference here for the father tongue over the mother tongue, as Cavell explains: "A son of man is born of woman; but rebirth, according to our Bible, is the business of the father."

   2017, Andrew Norris, Becoming Who We Are, →ISBN

   Antonyms: father tongue