Meaning of father tongue | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A separate language for expressing ideas, as opposed to the vernacular (mother tongue) which is employed for everyday speech.
2. The form of language acquired through education and reading, as opposed to the dialect one grows up speaking; educated or formal language.
3. A second language that one speaks fluently.
4. The language spoken by one's father, when it differs from that spoken by one's mother.

Examples

“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.”

“[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).”

“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.”

“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’.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We learn the father tongue to prove we have outgrown the mother tongue.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Throughout their long history as a minority, Anglo-Indians learned their "father tongue" but were indifferent to their "mother tongue," an indigenous Indian language.”

“English is / my father tongue. / A father tongue is / a foreign language, / therefore English is / a foreign language / not a mother tongue.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My father tongue was Welsh, the only language ever used between my father and his mother; [...]”

CEFR level