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Article: Mother tongues and literary languages.
- Article from:
- The Modern Language Review
- Article date:
- October 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Modern Humanities Research Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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'Native speaker' and 'mother tongue' are two symmetrical and converse notions. They seem to refer to the same reality from two opposite viewpoints. Native speakers, by definition, speak their mother tongue, and a mother tongue is the language of a native speaker, but, in spite of this correspondence, the implications and the history of these two designations are very different, and, for both expressions, part of the difficulty lies in the relation they have with the notion of literary language.
In this lecture I shall discuss four points: native speaker; mother tongue; births and deaths of languages; and literary usage. I shall look in particular at topics ...