"father tongue" meaning in English

See father tongue in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

IPA: /ˈfɑː.ðə ˌtʌŋ/ [Received-Pronunciation], /ˈfɑ.ðɚ ˌtʌŋ/ [General-American] Audio: en-us-father tongue.mp3 [General-American] Forms: father tongues [plural]
Etymology: From father + tongue (“language”), modelled after mother tongue. Etymology templates: {{com|en|father|tongue|t2=language}} father + tongue (“language”), {{m|en|mother tongue}} mother tongue Head templates: {{en-noun}} father tongue (plural father tongues)
  1. A separate language for expressing ideas, as opposed to the vernacular (mother tongue) which is employed for everyday speech.
    Sense id: en-father_tongue-en-noun-snIAbJZk
  2. The form of language acquired through education and reading, as opposed to the dialect one grows up speaking; educated or formal language.
    Sense id: en-father_tongue-en-noun-wWmg--lT
  3. A second language that one speaks fluently. Categories (topical): Languages
    Sense id: en-father_tongue-en-noun-F1yDYTAW Disambiguation of Languages: 24 22 32 22 Categories (other): English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 9 32 54 4 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 16 29 48 7
  4. The language spoken by one's father, when it differs from that spoken by one's mother.
    Sense id: en-father_tongue-en-noun-vzefLKd9

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for father tongue meaning in English (10.9kB)

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          "text": "[Attipate Krishnaswami] Ramanujan has also argued that many Hindu men have both a mother tongue (the everyday language, such as Tamil, spoken by women downstairs, in the back, in the kitchen) and a father tongue (once Sanskrit, more recently English, the literary lingua franca spoken—or at least discussed—by men in the front rooms).",
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          "text": "In the late medieval period, the rules of proper speech, which I call the \"father\" tongue, forbade the outright naming of sexual parts or open discussion of lower bodily functions such as sexual intercourse or excretion.",
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          "text": "On the one hand, she [Ursula Kroeber Le Guin] argued, there is the ‘mother tongue’ of the home: the conversational language mode that we learned from our mothers and speak to our children, ‘the language stories are told in’. [...] On the other hand, there is the ‘father tongue’, which is native to no one: an ‘excellent dialect’, ‘immensely noble and indispensably useful’, that we have to go to college to learn fully.",
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          "text": "I was born in Kenya, and so was my mother. This makes me a Kenya citizen. My childhood and boyhood were in idyllic countryside in Singida, Tanzania near Arusha. With beautiful lakes, bewitching butterflies, endless plains running for the horizon and people with the sweetness and suaveness of the Swahili. This makes Swahili, the main language of Tanzania, my father tongue and me a Swahili boy.",
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          "text": "[Attipate Krishnaswami] Ramanujan has also argued that many Hindu men have both a mother tongue (the everyday language, such as Tamil, spoken by women downstairs, in the back, in the kitchen) and a father tongue (once Sanskrit, more recently English, the literary lingua franca spoken—or at least discussed—by men in the front rooms).",
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          "text": "In the early Middle Ages, ‘mother tongue’ was largely ‘a pejorative term to describe the unlearned language of women and children’ (Haugen 1991: 82). This reflected the low status of women in society and contrasted with Latin, the more prestigious ‘father tongue’ on the continent.",
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          "text": "In the late medieval period, the rules of proper speech, which I call the \"father\" tongue, forbade the outright naming of sexual parts or open discussion of lower bodily functions such as sexual intercourse or excretion.",
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          "text": "On the one hand, she [Ursula Kroeber Le Guin] argued, there is the ‘mother tongue’ of the home: the conversational language mode that we learned from our mothers and speak to our children, ‘the language stories are told in’. [...] On the other hand, there is the ‘father tongue’, which is native to no one: an ‘excellent dialect’, ‘immensely noble and indispensably useful’, that we have to go to college to learn fully.",
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          "text": "In each case, we are reborn—a fact that explains [Henry David] Thoreau's preference here for the father tongue over the mother tongue, as [Stanley] Cavell explains: \"A son of man is born of woman; but rebirth, according to our Bible, is the business of the father.\" The rebirth of Walden will involve baptism in the waters of Walden Pond, and, by extension, in Walden, the book Thoreau endeavors to write in the father tongue.",
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          "text": "Throughout their long history as a minority, Anglo-Indians learned their \"father tongue\" but were indifferent to their \"mother tongue,\" an indigenous Indian language.",
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          "text": "English is / my father tongue. / A father tongue is / a foreign language, / therefore English is / a foreign language / not a mother tongue.",
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          "ref": "2004, Judit Szekacs-Weisz, Ivan Ward, editors, Lost Childhood and the Language of Exile, [London]: Imago East West, The Freud Museum, page 11",
          "text": "It is our mother's voice which introduces us to language and in this way it is the only tongue, whereas the father tongue is learnt systematically.",
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          "ref": "2009, Ba[hadur] Tejani, “A Letter to My Readers from the Author: My Life as a Writer”, in Laughing in the Face of Terrorism […], [Seattle, Wash.?]: BookSurge Publishing, page 5",
          "text": "I was born in Kenya, and so was my mother. This makes me a Kenya citizen. My childhood and boyhood were in idyllic countryside in Singida, Tanzania near Arusha. With beautiful lakes, bewitching butterflies, endless plains running for the horizon and people with the sweetness and suaveness of the Swahili. This makes Swahili, the main language of Tanzania, my father tongue and me a Swahili boy.",
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          "text": "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.",
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          "ref": "2008, Xiao-lei Wang, “The Home Years”, in Colin Baker, editor, Growing Up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven (Parents’ and Teachers’ Guides; no. 11), Bristol, Tonawanda, N.Y.: Multilingual Matters, page 58",
          "text": "Informed by the experience of other parents who had successfully raised their children with more than one language and our own observations, we knew clearly that Léandre and Dominique's mother tongue and father tongue would not have a chance without deliberate 'control' of their linguistic environment.",
          "type": "quotation"
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          "text": "My father tongue was Welsh, the only language ever used between my father and his mother; [...]",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The language spoken by one's father, when it differs from that spoken by one's mother."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "father",
          "father"
        ],
        [
          "differ",
          "differ"
        ],
        [
          "mother",
          "mother"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "ipa": "/ˈfɑː.ðə ˌtʌŋ/",
      "tags": [
        "Received-Pronunciation"
      ]
    },
    {
      "ipa": "/ˈfɑ.ðɚ ˌtʌŋ/",
      "tags": [
        "General-American"
      ]
    },
    {
      "audio": "en-us-father tongue.mp3",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/En-us-father_tongue.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/3/3e/En-us-father_tongue.mp3/En-us-father_tongue.mp3.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "General-American"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (GA)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "father tongue"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-17 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-01 using wiktextract (0b52755 and 5cb0836). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.