AI Summary & Key Takeaways
AI InsightMany participants avoid the term altogether and instead rely on implicit assumptions.
📌 3 Key Takeaways
Abstract
This article examines how migrants conceptualise and use the term mother tongue in language-biographical interviews. Although the notion is widely employed in everyday and institutional contexts, linguistics has long criticised its conceptual vagueness and ideological implications. We show that mother tongue can index diverse meanings including first acquisition, dominant proficiency, emotional attachment, cultural identity, or symbolic belonging. The article analyses empirically a dataset of 38 interviews with Turkish-German returnees and transmigrants. Only seven participants explicitly use the term mother tongue, yet their usage varies considerably: German is at times described as an unmarked mother tongue, at other times as an “almost” mother tongue, or - when associated with insufficient language proficiency - clearly not as a mother tongue. In one case, both German and Turkish are simultaneously referred to as mother tongues. The findings show that mother tongue is not a stable category but rather a situationally and biographically negotiated concept that reflects speakers’ identity, legitimacy, and positioning. Many participants avoid the term altogether and instead rely on implicit assumptions.