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, language, speech, tongue, vocabularyRelated 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