Dear colleagues,

 

I need some help form native speakers. Is it OK to use "my mother language" instead of my mother tongue or native language? The expression can be found on the internet but not in any of my dictionaries, including the dictionary of collocations. 

 

I would really appreciate your help. Thanks. 

Dear Cunliffe,

 

The fact is that that is how we say in my mother tongue it and the phrase as a literal/direct translation. However, I have to check all the possibilities because when students find a phrase on the Internet, they think it is OK to use it. Thank you once again.

Zvonka, you (or your students) might be interested to know that the term "mother language" is sometimes used in historical linguistics when referring to the relationship between different languages of the same family. In keeping with the biological analogy, "daughter languages" which derive from the same mother language are known as "sister languages". You might say that Germanic, Celtic, Italic and Balto-Slavic languages, for example, are all "sisters" ~ being "daughters" of a reconstructed parent called Proto-Indo-European. There you go...

Incidentally, I�ve also heard mother language being used as a variant of mother tongue (there�s actually a "Mother Language Day"), but I wouldn�t say it was a particularly common usage.

Alex