Mother tongue in Serbia: A speakers’ perspective on the meaning of the concept

Abstract

The present study analyzes the meanings bilingual and multilingual speakers attach to the term mother tongue, a familiar concept which is most often intuitively understood, but difficult to define. Taking as the main frame of reference the vulnerable linguistic communities of Serbia, the authors assess the answers given by the interviewees to the open question “What does the notion of mother tongue mean to you?” asked in the pilot sociolinguistic questionnaire the study is based on. The responses are classified in several categories, which are then analyzed and discussed. The findings show that the speakers give equal importance to the period of language acquisition, in early childhood, and the role of the family in language transmission for defining mother tongue. The diversity of responses obtained in the study suggests that the definitions provided by the censuses, used in the education context, human rights literature, or sociolinguistics, do not necessarily overlap with the social reality, as the actual members of the linguistic communities perceive the concept as being more heterogeneous than generally assumed and do not automatically connect it to mothers.