What is the difference between mother tongue and native language in linguistics?

The mother tongue, also known as the first language, is one or several languages ??that a person first comes into contact with, learns and masters. The mother tongue is generally exposed to the mother tongue from childhood and continues to be used until adolescence or later; and a considerable part of a person's family or formal education, especially in the early years, is taught through the mother tongue.

The ability to use the mother tongue is crucial to a person's further learning process, because thinking is mostly based on the mother tongue; therefore, the mother tongue plays a central role in the education process. If you don't know your mother tongue well, you will also have difficulty learning other languages.

The term "native language" can also give people the wrong impression. Mother tongue is not determined by place of birth or ancestry. The mother tongue is not necessarily the mother's language. For example, in some patriarchal societies, the mother comes from a different language area, and the children usually only use the local language, and only a few of them can master the mother's language. Similarly, for the descendants of immigrants, the "mother tongue" is not necessarily the language of the mother country or home country, but may even be a man-made language (such as Esperanto).

A person can have two or more native languages ??and therefore be "bilingual" or "multilingual". The order in which languages ??are learned does not necessarily represent proficiency.

The mother tongue is the phonetic pronunciation subconsciously reflected in our minds when we think. It is the language that each of us has practiced speaking since we were babbling. When we learn another foreign language, it is generally difficult to achieve mastery at the mother tongue level. The concept of phonetic pronunciation changes is broader due to the influence of native language background. Pronunciation changes are generally caused by differences in accent, speaking speed, speaking habits, context, etc. There are two common pronunciation changes: (1) Phonetic change. Such as phoneme substitution, insertion, deletion errors, etc. (2) Acoustic change. For some actual pronunciation changes, there are no significant features similar to A→B in phoneme changes.

Native language refers to the common language of the nation. For example, the native language of the Chinese people is Chinese. The native language of the British is English.

There can only be one native language, and it is a universal communication language