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Mother tongue   /mˈəðər təŋ/   Listen
Mother tongue

noun
1.
One's native language; the language learned by children and passed from one generation to the next.  Synonyms: first language, maternal language.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Mother tongue" Quotes from Famous Books



... Testament of Erasmus. From that moment one thought was at his heart. He "perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... arose, solemn and sweet, in accents familiar as their mother tongue, to those who chanted; but had any other been near, not a syllable would have been intelligible. But the voice which in general led to such solemn service—so thrilling in its sweetness, that the most indifferent could not listen to it unmoved—now lay hushed ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... "the world will hear of him yet, though he was only a workman, and the son of a workman. He has not been at your schools and your colleges, but he can write his mother tongue, as Shakespeare and Cobbett wrote it; and you must do that, if you wish to influence ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... know pantry is not Greek." The captain tries English fustian, and when Gradus maintained that the words are English, "Out upon you for a jackanapes," cries the old man; "as if I didn't know my own mother tongue!" and gives his verdict in ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... straightforwardness, the fulness and shades of suggestion and association, with which, in handling ideas of subtlety and difficulty, a writer would wish to speak to his reader, and which he could find only in his mother tongue. It might have been thought that with Bacon's contempt of form and ceremony in these matters, his consciousness of the powers of English in his hands might have led him to anticipate that a flexible and rich and strong language might create a literature, and that a literature, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church


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