father tongue

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English

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WOTD – 8 September 2020

Etymology

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From father +‎ tongue (“language”), modelled after mother tongue.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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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.
    Antonym: mother tongue
    • 2009, Françoise Král, “Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject”, in Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, →DOI, →ISBN, page 142:
      This also implies that the initial dichotomy – the mother tongue as the language of affect as opposed to the father tongue, as the language of cognitive development – needs to be questioned and redefined in the context of diasporic experience, maybe as the language one lives in as opposed to the language one works in.
    • 2011, Wendy Doniger, “Mother Goose and the Voices of Women”, in The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (Columbia Classics in Religion), updated edition, New York, N.Y., Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 144:
      [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).
    • 2012, Máiréad Nic Craith, “The Web of Family Relationships”, in Narratives of Place, Belonging and Language: An Intercultural Perspective, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, →DOI, →ISBN, page 75:
      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.
    • 2013, Anthony Lees-Smith, “Ordinary Theology as ‘Mother Tongue’”, in Jeff Astley, Leslie J. Francis, editors, Exploring Ordinary Theology: Everyday Christian Believing and the Church (Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology), Abington, Oxfordshire, New York, N.Y.: Routledge, published 2016, →ISBN, part I (Reflecting on Ordinary Theology: Analytical and Theological Perspectives), page 24:
      Ironically, it may be argued that in appointing a particular sophisticated form of the vernacular for such use, Dante [Alighieri] was, in effect, creating another ‘father tongue’.
  2. The form of language acquired through education and reading, as opposed to the dialect one grows up speaking; educated or formal language.
    Antonym: mother tongue
    • 1854 August 9, Henry D[avid] Thoreau, “Reading”, in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, page 110:
      It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they [books] are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. [...] The other [the language read] is the maturity and experience of that [the language heard]; 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.
    • 1988, Laura Kendrick, “Breaking Verbal Taboos: The Consolations of Fiction III”, in Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Calif., London: University of California Press, →ISBN, page 74:
      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.
    • 1992, Gail B. Griffin, Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue, Pasadena, Calif.: Trilogy Books, →ISBN, page 169:
      We learn the father tongue to prove we have outgrown the mother tongue.
    • 2008, Jeff Astley, “Giving Voice to the Ordinary: Theological Listening and the Mother Tongue”, in Natalie K. Watson, Stephen Burns, editors, Exchanges of Grace: Essays in Honour of Ann Loades, London: SCM Press, →ISBN, part 3 (The Dance of Grace: A Sacramental World), page 202:
      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.
    • 2017, Andrew Norris, “Community and Voice”, in Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell, Oxford, Oxfordshire, New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 155:
      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.
  3. A second language that one speaks fluently.
    • 1973, Noel P[itts] Gist, Roy Dean Wright, “Styles of Life”, in K. Ishwaran, editor, Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially Mixed Minority in India (Monographs and Theoretical Studies in Sociology and Anthropology in Honour of Nels Anderson; 3), Leiden: E[vert] J[an] Brill, →ISBN, page 148:
      Throughout their long history as a minority, Anglo-Indians learned their "father tongue" but were indifferent to their "mother tongue," an indigenous Indian language.
    • 1986, M[arlene] NourbeSe Philip, “Discourse on the Logic of Language”, in Journal of West Indian Literature, volume 14, Bridgetown, Barbados: Department of English, University of the West Indies, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 187:
      English is / my father tongue. / A father tongue is / a foreign language, / therefore English is / a foreign language / not a mother tongue.
    • 2004, Judit Szekacs-Weisz, Ivan Ward, editors, Lost Childhood and the Language of Exile, [London]: Imago East West, The Freud Museum, →ISBN, page 11:
      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.
    • 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, →ISBN, page 5:
      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.
  4. The language spoken by one's father, when it differs from that spoken by one's mother.
    Antonym: mother tongue
    • 2006, Jenifer Bratter, “Census Statistics”, in edited by Yo[landa Kaye] Jackson, Encyclopedia of Multicultural Psychology (A SAGE Reference Publication), Thousand Oaks, Calif., London: SAGE Publications, →ISBN, page 81, column 2:
      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.
    • 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, →ISBN, page 58:
      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.
    • 2008 May, Gillian Clarke, “Voice of the Tribe”, in At the Source: A Writer’s Year, New York, N.Y.: Carcanet Press, published 2011, →ISBN, page 56:
      My father tongue was Welsh, the only language ever used between my father and his mother; [...]

Translations

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