native roots
Ancestral cultural foundations
Native roots are the original linguistic elements of a language before borrowing from other tongues—in English, the Anglo-Saxon core beneath layers of Latin, French, and Greek.
The phrase also describes a person's ancestral origins or cultural heritage: She returned to explore her native roots in Ireland.
In botany, native roots belong to plants indigenous to a region rather than introduced species.
- indigenousOriginating in a region
- ancestralOf one's forebears
- heritageInherited cultural legacy
- oral traditionCulture passed by speech
- homelandOne's native land
old country · origin · tribe · soil · earth · plants · tubers · lineage · bloodline · family tree · blood ties · tradition · aboriginal · grounded · deep · buried · ancient · cultural
- linguisticslinguistics, phoneme, phonemes, morpheme, morphemes
native rootsinvasive species
Harmful non-native organism
introduced species · exotic species · alien species · naturalized species
native, natives, natively, nativity, nation, nations, national, nationally, nationality