Mother Tongues and Literary Languages

Abstract

'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 laguages; and literary usage. I shall look in particular at topics emerging in the context of Latin, Hebrew, and Italian. The paper was written from the perspective of someone who is prevalently a linguist but one who is also interested in the literary aspect of the questions he is discussing, who, in fact, believes that although the two approaches, the linguistic and the literary, are distinct, they can only gain from being linked to each other, and in some cases they inevitably suffer from being kept apart.