mother tongue
Pluralmother tongues
- 1The language a person learns first and grows up speaking, as distinct from any language learned later in life.
His mother tongue is Vietnamese, though he has written all his novels in French.
Many translators prefer to work into their mother tongue, where their ear for idiom is sharpest.
Note
The everyday meaning rides on a very old phrase: Middle English already said mother tonge or modyr tong, and Old Norse had a matching móðurtunga. Tongue means "language" here, as in native tongue. First language, native language and the shorthand L1 say the same thing more plainly; the phrase keeps the image of speech first heard from a mother. Its opposite, father tongue, names a language learned later and felt as foreign.
- 2The language spoken by one's ancestors, the earlier generations from whom one's family descends.
Third-generation immigrants sometimes take night classes to recover a mother tongue their parents stopped speaking.
Activists argue that the community's mother tongue, silent for two generations, deserves a place in the local schools.
- 3The language spoken by one's mother, in a family where the father speaks a different language.
In their house the children's mother tongue was Korean and their father tongue Portuguese, and they answered each parent in kind.
The survey asked respondents to name both a mother tongue and a father tongue if their parents spoke different languages.
Note
The mother is meant literally in this case, and the sense only works in company. Census questions once asked about a mother tongue and a father tongue side by side, and Xiao-Lei Wang's Growing Up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven (2008) names both for the same children. Without that partner close by, readers fall back on the native-language meaning, so give the father's language in the same sentence.
Less common meaning
- 4Informal, everyday speech, contrasted with the more polished language of educated people.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English "mother tonge" or "modyr tong", formed from "mother" and "tongue". It can be compared with the Old Norse "móðurtunga", which has the same meaning.