Mother Tongues and Nations

This monograph examines the ideological legacy of the metaphors, “mother tongue” and “native speaker,” by historicizing their linguistic development. Early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race that generated the philologies of (early) modernity and their genetic and arboreal “families” of languages. Enracination of language persists today. Scholarly recognition of the biological metaphors that racialize language will help to combat continued ethnolinguistic discrimination.