mother tongue

mother tongue

noun

Definition of MOTHER TONGUE

1

: one's native language

2

: a language from which another language derives

Examples of MOTHER TONGUE

1. <although the anthropologist could speak the local language fairly well, she was always glad to find someone who shared her mother tongue>

First Known Use of MOTHER TONGUE

14th century

Related to MOTHER TONGUE

Synonyms: lingo, language, speech, tongue, vocabulary

Related Words: acrolect; argot, cant, colloquial, dialect, idiolect, idiom, jargon, parlance, patois, patter, pidgin, slang, slanguage, vernacular; colloquialism, localism, provincialism, regionalism, shibboleth, vernacularism; terminology; coinage, modernism, neologism

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Rhymes with MOTHER TONGUE

adder's-tongue, Aqua-Lung, bite one's tongue, double-hung, double-tongue, egg foo yong, farmer's lung, hold one's tongue, triple-tongue, overstrung, underslung