mother tongue

At the time, Adamu argued that pupils grasped concepts more readily when taught in "their own mother tongue" - a view supported by numerous UN studies on early childhood education.

As the young children enthusiastically sang out phrases, Esau interjected occasionally to correct their pronunciation of the distinct sounds and deep clicks of her mother tongue, of which she is the last first-language speaker.

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.