Word.ws English Dictionary

mother tongues

mother tongues is the plural of mother tongue.

Meaning of mother tongue

Noun

mother tongue (plural mother tongues)

  1. The language one first learned; the language one grew up with; one's native language.
    • His mother tongue is a relatively conservative dialect of Aramaic.
    Antonyms:
    father tongue
  2. The language spoken by one’s ancestors.
  3. The language spoken by one's mother, when it differs from that spoken by one's father.
    • Questions about respondents' place of birth, their parents' place of birth, nativity, and language use (called “mother tongue” and “father tongue”) were added to the Census between 1850 and 1960.2006, Yo Jackson, Encyclopedia of Multicultural Psychology, →ISBN
    Antonyms:
    father tongue
  4. Informal speech, as opposed to educated language.
    • The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.1854, Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods
    Antonyms:
    father tongue

Questions about mother tongues

What is mother tongues the plural of?
Mother tongues is the plural of mother tongue.

Words near mother tongues in the dictionary

  1. Mother Teresas
  2. Mother Theresa
  3. Mother Theresas
  4. Mother Thumb and her four daughters
  5. mother tongue
  6. mother tongues
  7. mother up
  8. mother wit
  9. mother wits
  10. mother world
  11. mother worlds

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mother tongues (page history and authors); mother tongue (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: “mother tongues.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mother_tongues. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.