"Mother tongue" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... business in his own vernacular. He thinks and calculates better in French. Frequently when you engage him in conversation in English and the question of business comes up, you find that he instinctively lapses into his mother tongue. ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... daddy, and they were richt weel made," replied the lad, whose mode of speech was entirely different from his grandfather's: the latter had learned English as a foreign language, but could not speak Scotch, his mother tongue being Gaelic. ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... clothes enough in August to melt them. Nobody would have guessed from Bob's presentation now that he had ever been aloft on a dark night in the Atlantic, or knew the hundred ingenuities that could be performed with a rope's end and a marline-spike as well as his mother tongue. ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... ambition had been to see her son's name among the long list of clergymen of the family who had been ministers to the neighboring church of Stentrohult. She finally yielded, and the best possible use was made by Linnaeus of Dr. Rothman's tuition. Latin, then the mother tongue of all scientists and scholars, he wrote ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... whose force he felt to be telling on himself, from making any world for his thought in the minds of others—like a poet among people of a strange speech, who may have a poetry of their own, but have no ear for his cadence, no answering thrill to his discovery of the latent virtues in his mother tongue. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
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