The term we still use to designate someone’s attachment to a particular language, her potentially flawless competence, or the very “place” for her thoughts to emerge in coherent form, is “mother tongue”. We take it to be a natural condition of language acquisition, equally valid for every individual speaker, and thus forget that it is a mere metaphorical reference to the “first” language, spoken by what is referred to, with an even more misleading metaphor, a “native” speaker. Throughout history, the use and connotations of the expression “mother tongue” have undergone several changes.
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