mother tongue

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Using other languages
Anglocentric
Anglocentrism
bilingual education
bilingualism
bilinguality
interpret
machine translation
misrender
mistranslate
mistranslation
mother tongue
multilingually
natively
rendering
target language
translator
transliterate
trilingual
Waystage
word for wordidiom

Examples from literature

Suppose the first language spoken is French. 

first language | American Dictionary

first language
noun[ C ]
us/ˈfɜrst ˈlæŋ·ɡwɪdʒ/
the language you learn from your parents as you are growing up

Examples of first language

first language
It may be a means to promote balanced bilingual development and to avoid firstlanguage loss.
Human beings learn to speak (or sign) at least a firstlanguage without classroom instruction.
Second language acquisition necessarily has different historical contingencies than firstlanguage acquisition, not the least of which is that the learner already knows a language.
Other studies have found that the stress patterns of the firstlanguage may transfer into the second language.
Results indicated that both groups (monolingual and bilingual) showed superior recall performance for words and nonwords in their firstlanguage.
Firstlanguage attrition and the parameter setting model.
For instance, we have already suggested that the firstlanguage pattern may be initially imported into the second language.
First, the issue of language is a sensitive one and is of concern in firstlanguage and most certainly in second language research.
There are always situations in which people will prefer the texts to be in their firstlanguage.
This brings up another point - the impact of the firstlanguage on swearword orientation in the second.
Codeswitched items will occur at relatively unpredictable points in discourse, but then only surface again, in relatively predictable situations, in firstlanguage discourse.
Language attrition, whether in a firstlanguage or a second, is increasingly recognized as a normal part of changes in proficiency over time.
From it, researchers will gain a clear understanding of the importance of the parser in firstlanguage development.
Establishing scientific methods for the study of firstlanguage acquisition.
This is not an exclusive criticism to firstlanguage research.
See all examples of first language
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.