Mother tongue? Muttersprache? Lingua mater? Not so fast!

• 来源期刊: 国家科学评论（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2019,（2）
• 页码范围: 301
• 页数: 1页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1093/nsr/nwy114

摘要

In most languages, the arterial language, i.e.the language that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period of language learning, is referred to as the'mother tongue'.Whether or not this phrase is factually correct has been a matter of debate for a long time. One way to tackle this problem is to use genetic markers, and look at their concordance or discordance with linguistic geographical distributions and phylogenetic relationships.