mother tongue

It made him wonder how his generation had slowly drifted away from their mother tongue, as other languages like English, Urdu and Hindi became more widespread.

He also dropped English as the primary language for his literature and vowed to only write in his mother tongue, Kikuyu.

Anxiety about immigrants’ attachment to their mother tongues goes back to colonial days.

Rapping in the Irish language, a hip-hop trio from Belfast lead a movement to save their mother tongue.

"Iranians were here. They all fled," one of them says, speaking in his mother tongue, a dialect of Turkish.