mother tongues
First learned languages
Mother tongues is the plural of mother tongue, the language a person learns first from family in early childhood—their native language.
The term emphasizes the intimate, familial transmission of language: Children absorb their mother tongues before formal schooling begins.
In multilingual societies, people may have multiple mother tongues or distinguish between home language and dominant culture.
- native languagesLanguages learned from birth
- native tonguesLanguages learned from birth
- passing downGiving to successors
- languagesSystems of human communication
- endangered languagesSpeech nearing extinction
dying words · vernaculars · language loss · indigenous languages · multilingualism · fluency · language preservation · native · language rights · identity · oral traditions · ancestral languages · foreign · first · heritage · immigrant · spoken · culture
mother, tongue, maternal, motherly, motherhood, mothers, mothering, maternity, mothered