mother tongues

plural of mother tongue
as in languages
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

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Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of mother tongues Work with people of different ages, backgrounds, perspectives, and mother tongues. Rachel Konrad, Time, 9 Dec. 2025 Each actress nails the comedic timing – and the accented English that flows with the cadence of their mother tongues. Elizabeth B. Kim, Cincinnati Enquirer, 7 Nov. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for mother tongues
Noun
  • For localization, Voithru’s Totus offers AI dubbing across 29 languages, and XL8 brings both MediaCAT and EventCAT for video localization and real-time interpretation.
    Naman Ramachandran, Variety, 26 Aug. 2026
  • Flowkey works across laptops, phones, and tablets and is available in 11 languages.
    StackCommerce Team, PC Magazine, 23 Aug. 2026
Noun
  • Yet a 2023 Stanford study said that Pangram was biased against non-native English speakers, who might have more limited vocabularies, and many AI researchers contend that such detectors are unreliable.
    Cameron Pugh, Christian Science Monitor, 12 Aug. 2026
  • Chinese law schools have accordingly placed greater weight on teaching Chinese students to argue using the vocabularies of foreign legal systems.
    Mark Jia, Foreign Affairs, 7 Aug. 2026
Noun
  • As the bullying escalates and tensions boil over, tongues loosen, forcing the truth out into the open.
    Christian Zilko, IndieWire, 18 Aug. 2026
  • The women in the WNBA should no more be required to hold their tongues than the men who play in the NBA.
    Dana O’Neil, CNN Money, 12 Aug. 2026
Noun
  • There are plenty of idioms to describe Andrean outside hitter Aleece Ehler’s freshman season.
    Noah Poser, Chicago Tribune, 18 Aug. 2026
  • On the one hand, the translation serves as a source for the idioms of nineteenth-century English; on the other, as evidence of the ideas that the translator held about a Colombian woman writer.
    Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 1 July 2026
Noun
  • Researchers have built ArabCulture-Dialogue, the first benchmark for testing whether leading AI models can understand and converse in Modern Standard Arabic and 13 national dialects.
    Melissa Hancock, Fortune, 19 Aug. 2026
  • And while Hasidic dialects are by far the most spoken among modern Yiddish speakers, opportunities to learn the Hasidic dialect from native speakers like Malowicki are relatively rare.
    ABC News, ABC News, 13 Aug. 2026

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Cite this Entry

“Mother tongues.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/mother%20tongues. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026.

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