mother tongue

mother tongue

noun

Definition of MOTHER TONGUE

the stock of words, pronunciation, and grammar used by a people as their basic means of communication <although the anthropologist could speak the local language fairly well, she was always glad to find someone who shared her mother tongue>

Synonyms lingo, mother tongue, 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