matrilingual

English

WOTD – 21 February 2020

Etymology

From matri- (prefix meaning ‘mother’) +‎ lingual (“related to language or linguistics”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /mætɹɪˈlɪŋɡwəl/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˌmætɹɪˈlɪŋɡwəl/
• Hyphenation: ma‧tri‧lin‧gual
• Rhymes: -ɪŋɡwəl

Adjective

matrilingual (not comparable)

1. (rare) Pertaining to one's mother tongue.
   • 1953, G[eorge] M[ichael] Wickens, “Arabic Literature”, in Eric B[ertrand] Ceadel, editor, Literatures of the East, an Appreciation (Wisdom of the East), London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, page 25:

     Indeed, the obstacles in the way of compiling a comprehensive dictionary of the classical language are enormous, when one reflects on the vastness of the surviving literature, the fantastic richness of the language, the diverse matrilingual origins of the writers themselves, and the time and the area over which the language has continued to be written in its present form: for fourteen hundred years, in places as far apart as China and Spain.

   • 1956, The Islamic Quarterly, London: Islamic Cultural Centre, →OCLC, page 109, column 1:

     What Dr. Margaret Smith refers to as Ghazăli's 'knowledge of Persian' (Al-Ghazălī, the Mystic, Luzac, 1944, p. 67) was surely a profound matrilingual cast: that he normally thought in Persian can scarcely be doubted, and it may well be that he often composed in that language and then translated into Arabic (cf. infra Section IV and Section V, para, numbered 3).

   • 1979 spring, G[eorge] M[ichael] Wickens, “A[lfred] F[elix] L[andon] Beeston, Samples of Arabic Prose in Its Historical Development (a Manual for English-speaking Students), Oxford University Press (for the James Mew Fund) 1977. Pp. 47. Price: £1.80. [book review]”, in Journal of Semitic Studies, volume 24, number 1, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 140:

     As to the style of the Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (p. 7), it is surely not only more complex than "that of the early ḵuṭba", but also more unwieldy than practically everything that followed. This may have been partly due to matrilingual "interference", but clearly he and others were feeling their way towards the new skill of composing written discourse rather than merely recording the written word.

   • 1991, Richard W[eld] Bailey, “English Abroad”, in Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, page 60:

     These ideas became, almost immediately, a commonplace in the celebrations of English that continue to excite matrilingual sentiments.

Translations

pertaining to one's mother tongue