Meaning of matrilingual | Babel Free

Definitions

Pertaining to one's mother tongue.

not-comparable, rare

Examples

“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.”

“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).”

“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.”

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

CEFR level