Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Mother \Moth"er\, a. Received by birth or from ancestors; native, natural; as, mother language; also acting the part, or having the place of a mother; producing others; originating. It is the mother falsehood from which all idolatry is derived. --T. Arnold. Mother cell (Biol.), a cell which, by endogenous divisions, gives rise to other cells (daughter cells); a parent cell. Mother church, the original church; a church from which other churches have sprung; as, the mother church of a diocese. Mother country, the country of one's parents or ancestors; the country from which the people of a colony derive their origin. Mother liquor (Chem.), the impure or complex residual solution which remains after the salts readily or regularly crystallizing have been removed. Mother queen, the mother of a reigning sovereign; a queen mother. Mother tongue.
A language from which another language has had its origin.
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The language of one's native land; native tongue.
Mother water. See Mother liquor (above).
Mother wit, natural or native wit or intelligence.
Wiktionary
n. 1 The language one first learned; the language one grew up with; one's native language. 2 The language spoken by one’s ancestors.
WordNet
n. one's native language; the language learned by children and passed from one generation to the next [syn: maternal language, first language]
Wikipedia
Mother Tongue is an annual academic journal published by the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory (ASLIP) that has been published since 1995. Its goal is to encourage international and interdisciplinary information sharing, discussion, and debate among geneticists, paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, and historical linguists on questions relating to the origin of language and ancestral human spoken languages. This includes, but is not limited to, discussion of linguistic macrofamily hypotheses.
Mother tongue usually refers to a person's first language.
Mother tongue may also refer to:
- Proto-Human language, the hypothetical most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages
- The Mother Tongue (book), a history of the English language by Bill Bryson
- Mother Tongue (journal), a periodical published by the Association for the Study of Languages in Prehistory
- Mother Tongue (film), a 1993 film featuring Craig Parker
In music:
- Mother Tongue Records, a UK record label
- Mother Tongue (band), an American rock band co-founded by guitarist Jesse Tobias
- "Mother Tongue", a song by Dead Can Dance from The Serpent's Egg
- Native Tongue (album), 1993, Bret Michaels, Ritchie Kotzen, Bobby Dall, Rikki Rokket.
Usage examples of "mother tongue".
Yeshu spoke his tortured mother tongue as well as Alban, Wendish, and Salian.
I give you one more opportunity to cooperate: Produce this central argument of Jin Del's, this masterpiece of error that attempts to link Liad and Terra to a common mother tongue.
By the end of the week, I couldn't even remember one word of my Mother Tongue.
Not sure how to take Bess's chuckle, Alex rose and spoke, firmly and quietly, in his mother tongue.
It spoke deep within him in the language of the sea itself, and Kennit recognized his mother tongue.
Did she recall her early days of being alone in a foreign court where no one spoke her mother tongue or recognized her customs?