Word.ws English Dictionary

birthtongue

birthtongue noun: one's first language, learnt in early childhood; native language.

Noun

birthtongue (plural birthtongues)

  1. (rare) One's first language, learnt in early childhood; native language.
    • In replying timidly, Anita revealed her foreign accent, which was instantly observed. “You are American, of course? No? English? Ah, how stupid I am!" Forthwith he began to talk fluently in German, though Anita saw it was not his birthtongue.1880, All the Year Round, volume 25, page 203
    • And now I place them, palms up, wrong five-legged beasts with their underbellies exposed, on the desk for you who have told me, in your own broken wedding of English and your birthtongue, […]1976, Albert Goldbarth, Comings Back: A Sequence of Poems, page 78

Examples of birthtongue in a sentence

  • Neo-Gaesh, and that's Orlen's birthtongue."1990, Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth Moon, Sassinak:
  • Faan talked constantly to herself and to anyone who'd listen, mixing the Fadogur she was learning with her birthtongue in a hash of sound that gradually grew more comprehensible.1991, Jo Clayton, Wild Magic, page 48:
  • Other forms of cultural non-homogeneity (birthtongue or ethnic identity, for example) have, in the generally supportive nature of the group process, tended to become not only not a problem, […]1998, Wojciech W. Gasparski, David Botham, Action Learning, page 112:

Forms of birthtongue

pluralbirthtongues
alternative formbirth-tongue
alternative formbirth tongue

Origin of birthtongue

From Middle English burþe tonge, equivalent to birth + tongue.

Questions about birthtongue

What does birthtongue mean?
Birthtongue means one's first language, learnt in early childhood; native language.
How do you use birthtongue in a sentence?
Neo-Gaesh, and that's Orlen's birthtongue."
What part of speech is birthtongue?
Birthtongue is a noun.
What is the plural of birthtongue?
The plural of birthtongue is birthtongues.

Words near birthtongue in the dictionary

  1. birthstools
  2. birthtide
  3. birthtides
  4. birthtime
  5. birthtimes
  6. birthtongue
  7. birthtongues
  8. birthtown
  9. birthtowns
  10. birthweek
  11. birthweeks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: birthtongue (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “birthtongue.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/birthtongue. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.