Mother tongue teaching

Abstract

The association of 'mother tongue' with national language has a long history. Certainly the word's earliest appearances in medieval European texts indicate its use in relation to the legal language of the court and thus of governance. From the Renaissance onwards, as nation states emerged as the territorial basis for administration and cultural identity, internal lingua francas developed as both vehicles of governance and emblems of national identity. 'National' languages were thus constructed. Only two centuries later Humboldt (1972) was confidently articulating the view that every language expressed the 'spirit of the nation' that speaks it, possessing its own inner form [innere Sprachform]. Such a view was to become highly influential throughout Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 'Language', he argued, makes 'man at home in the world', though he cautioned, 'it also has the power to alienate'. In the early twentieth century in England, moves to establish the English mother tongue as a school subject invoked this intimate relation between language and nationhood: 'English is not merely the medium of our thought, it is the very stuff and process of it. It is itself the English mind.'

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