father tongue

This also implies that the initial dichotomy – the mother tongue as the language of affect as opposed to the father tongue, as the language of cognitive development – needs to be questioned and redefined in the context of diasporic experience, maybe as the language one lives in as opposed to the language one works in.

It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they [books] are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. … The other [the language read] is the maturity and experience of that [the language heard]; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.

Throughout their long history as a minority, Anglo-Indians learned their "father tongue" but were indifferent to their "mother tongue," an indigenous Indian language.

Questions about respondents' place of birth, their parents' place of birth, nativity, and language use (called "mother tongue" and "father tongue") were added to the Census between 1850 and 1960.