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Examples of mother tongue in a Sentence
although the anthropologist could speak the local language fairly well, she was always glad to find someone who shared her mother tongue
Recent Examples on the Web
Gutter language in many ways erodes our lovely mother tongue and demeans those individuals who use it.
—Reader Commentary, Baltimore Sun, 7 Mar. 2024
Similarly bilharzia in my mother tongue – Shona from Zimbabwe – is called the disease of cognitive function.
—Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR, 9 May 2024
What sets the tightly knit community, whose mother tongue is Arabic, apart from other minority communities within Israel’s borders is their fierce national pride.
—Lianne Kolirin, CNN, 21 Feb. 2024
Their wild journey features drugs, anti-British rap tunes and feuding with extremist groups and the cops, though the trio's use of the country's mother tongue fuels a youth movement against the establishment trying to tamp down this indigenous language.
—Brian Truitt, USA TODAY, 19 Jan. 2024
Sojourner Truth wasn’t Southern, and English wasn’t even her mother tongue.
—Cynthia Greenlee, Smithsonian Magazine, 12 Feb. 2024
This is the real life story of how this anarchic Belfast trio became the unlikely figureheads of a civil rights movement to save their mother tongue.
—Mia Galuppo, The Hollywood Reporter, 7 Feb. 2024
Conceived amid the bombs in Kabul, I was born and raised until age 7 in Fremont, and taught that my mother tongue, Farsi, was a foreign language.
—Various Staff Writers, Special Correspondents, and Special Contributors, The Christian Science Monitor, 22 Dec. 2023
My mother tongue is not my dad’s, and my grandma and I communicate on the shaky ground of Spanglish, neither of us having ever arrived at the comfort of fluency.
—Anna Luisa Rodriguez, Washington Post, 14 Dec. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'mother tongue.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
First Known Use
14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1
Time Traveler
The first known use of mother tongue was
in the 14th century
Dictionary Entries Near mother tongue
Cite this Entry
“Mother tongue.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mother%20tongue. Accessed 17 Jun. 2024.
Kids Definition
mother tongue
noun1
: one's native language
2
: a language from which another language develops
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