Definition of the word mother tongue

English[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Middle English mother tonge, modyr tong, equivalent to mother +‎ tongue. Compare Old Norse móðurtunga (“mother tongue”).

Pronunciation[edit]

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈmʌð.ə ˌtʌŋ/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈmʌð.ɚ ˌtʌŋ/

Noun[edit]

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.

   Synonyms: first language, mother language, native language, native tongue, L1

   Antonym: father tongue

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

     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.

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

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

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

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

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

     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).

   • 2012, Máiréad Nic Craith, Narratives of Place, Belonging and Language, →ISBN:

     In the early Middle Ages, ‘mother tongue’ was largely ‘a pejorative term to describe the unlearned language of women and children’ (Haugen 1991: 82). This reflected the low status of women in society and contrasted with Latin, the more prestigious ‘father tongue’ on the continent.

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.

   Antonym: father tongue

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

     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.

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

     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.

4. Informal speech, as opposed to educated language.

   Antonym: father tongue

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

     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.

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

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

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

     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.»

Translations[edit]

See also[edit]

• ancestry
• ethnicity

Further reading[edit]

The term «mother tongue» refers to a person’s native language — that is, a language learned from birth. Also called a first language, dominant language, home language, and native tongue (although these terms are not necessarily synonymous). 

Contemporary linguists and educators commonly use the term L1 to refer to a first or native language (the mother tongue) and the term L2 to refer to a second language or a foreign language that’s being studied.

Use of the Term ‘Mother Tongue’

«[T]he general usage of the term ‘mother tongue’…denotes not only the language one learns from one’s mother, but also the speaker’s dominant and home language; i.e., not only the first language according to the time of acquisition, but the first with regard to its importance and the speaker’s ability to master its linguistic and communicative aspects. For example, if a language school advertises that all its teachers are native speakers of English, we would most likely complain if we later learned that although the teachers do have some vague childhood memories of the time when they talked to their mothers in English, they, however, grew up in some non-English-speaking country and are fluent in a second language only. Similarly, in translation theory, the claim that one should translate only into one’s mother tongue is in fact a claim that one should only translate into one’s first and dominant language.

«The vagueness of this term has led some researchers to claim…that different connotative meanings of the term ‘mother tongue’ vary according to the intended usage of the word and that differences in understanding the term can have far-reaching and often political consequences.»

(Pokorn, N. Challenging the Traditional Axioms: Translation Into a Non-Mother Tongue. John Benjamins, 2005.)

Culture and Mother Tongue

«It is the language community of the mother tongue, the language spoken in a region, which enables the process of enculturation, the growing of an individual into a particular system of linguistic perception of the world and participation in the centuries-old history of linguistic production.»

(Tulasiewicz, W. and A. Adams, «What Is Mother Tongue?» Teaching the Mother Tongue in a Multilingual Europe. Continuum, 2005.)

«Cultural power can…backfire when the choices of those who embrace Americanness in language, accent, dress, or choice of entertainment stir resentment in those who do not. Every time an Indian adopts an American accent and curbs his ‘mother tongue influence,’ as the call centers label it, hoping to land a job, it seems more deviant, and frustrating, to have only an Indian accent.»(Giridharadas, Anand. «America Sees Little Return From ‘Knockoff Power.'» The New York Times, June 4, 2010.)

Myth and Ideology

«The notion of ‘mother tongue’ is thus a mixture of myth and ideology. The family is not necessarily the place where languages are transmitted, and sometimes we observe breaks in transmission, often translated by a change of language, with children acquiring as first language the one that dominates in the milieu. This phenomenon…concerns all multilingual situations and most of the situations of migration.»
(Calvet, Louis Jean. Towards an Ecology of World Languages. Polity Press, 2006.)

Top 20 Mother Tongues

«The mother tongue of more than three billion people is one of 20: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Javanese, German, Wu Chinese, Korean, French, Telugu, Marathi, Turkish, Tamil, Vietnamese, and Urdu. English is the lingua franca of the digital age, and those who use it as a second language may outnumber its native speakers by hundreds of millions. On every continent, people are forsaking their ancestral tongues for the dominant language of their region’s majority. Assimilation confers inarguable benefits, especially as internet use proliferates and rural youth gravitate to cities. But the loss of languages passed down for millennia, along with their unique arts and cosmologies, may have consequences that won’t be understood until it is too late to reverse them.»
(Thurman, Judith. «A Loss for Words.» The New Yorker, March 30, 2015.)

A Lighter Side of the Mother Tongue

«Gib’s friend: Forget her, I hear she only likes intellectuals.
Gib: So? I’m intellectual and stuff.
Gib’s friend: You’re flunking English. That’s your mother tongue and stuff.»
(The Sure Thing, 1985)

Словосочетания

Автоматический перевод

родной язык, материнский язык, родная речь, родной

Перевод по словам

mother  — мать, мама, матушка, мамаша, начало, источник, быть матерью, родить, лелеять, охранять
tongue  — язык, шпунт, язычок, шип, болтать, лизать, языковый