Thesaurus results for MOTHER TONGUE

mother tongue

noun

Definition of mother tongue

as in language

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 & Similar Words

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Example Sentences

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Recent Examples of mother tongue From the start of his career, Fela aimed to reach a larger and Pan-African audience by singing almost exclusively in Nigerian Pidgin English (rather than his mother tongue, Yoruba, which doesn't translate throughout most of the continent). — Ian Brennan, NPR, 15 Apr. 2026 Playing off a six-language broadcast which means it can be viewed by 75% of Europeans in their mother tongue, Arte is still growing. — John Hopewell, Variety, 26 Mar. 2026 The group last delivered a full-length in its mother tongue, Be, in November 2020. — Hugh McIntyre, Forbes.com, 20 Mar. 2026 First seen at a night-club table of menacing lowlifes, Ida, whose mother tongue is Brooklynese, suddenly switches to a heavy British accent and dispenses a torrent of highly literary sarcasms. — Richard Brody, New Yorker, 4 Mar. 2026 See All Example Sentences for mother tongue

Recent Examples of Synonyms for mother tongue

Noun

New and upcoming titles under the deal will carry English subtitles and dubbing in the Hindi, Tamil and Telugu languages.

— Naman Ramachandran, Variety, 27 July 2026
Translators still have steady work years after computer translation approached human parity, because there is no ceiling on what can be translated or into how many languages.

— Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 27 July 2026

Definition of language

Noun

For decades, fashion has expanded that vocabulary, introducing new cuts and silhouettes with the promise that each one says something different about the person wearing it.

— Alesandra Dubin, Glamour, 31 July 2026
This requires deployment at the edge, integration into proprietary data pipelines, fine-tuning for domain-specific vocabularies, and compliance with local data sovereignty laws.

— Gerui Wang, Forbes.com, 27 July 2026

Definition of vocabulary

Noun

Both Drake and Lütke rejected Canadian smallness, the reflex that says our cities are minor markets, our companies are acquisition targets, and our culture is a regional dialect of America's.

— Kumaran Nadesan, Forbes.com, 29 July 2026
Mandarin is the language of formal schooling in China since middle school, and the result, as Li describes it, is a generation that speaks its ancestral dialect with growing unfamiliarity.

— Naman Ramachandran, Variety, 28 July 2026