What is a mother tongue? It is, first of all, the language that your mother whispers to you over the cradle. The language in which you learn your first family ties. The language in which you remember the first children’s insults and praises. The one where you learn the first letters and find out who you really are.
The mother tongue is the one in which you unmistakably distinguish the accents of all its local speakers: from Valjevo or Sabac, from Novi Sad or Vrsac, from Uzice or Krusevac.
The mother tongue is the only one that, moreover, shows subtle differences in the small length of accented vowels as soon as you move twenty kilometers north or south from one place.
The mother tongue is the one in which we know the most swear words. I think I know at least a hundred of them, but it would not be polite to write any at this point.
The mother tongue is the only one in which, reading, you do not look at all the letters. The examination showed that only in the mother tongue we read as many first letters as there are syllables in the word. Simply put: for the word “fairy tale” we read only “b” and “j”; for the word “bed” only “p”, “s”, “t” and possibly “lj”.
That is why it is very difficult to be a proofreader in the mother tongue, because in such reading, unnaturally, every letter should be read.
Only in his mother tongue was there a writer Miroslav Josić Višnjić who was so obsessed with finding spelling mistakes that he and his wife read their pages on pauses, by turning them upside down and all the letters of his mother tongue falling upside down, thus forcing him to read them all.
However, his books also had at least some mistakes, because it is their mother tongue.
What else is a mother tongue?
It is the only language whose grammar we learn without normative rules, so when they later point out conjugations and declensions, we think that it is something artificial that the “naturalness” of our mother tongue does not need.
The mother tongue is the one in which we all think it is best sung. But will freedom be able to sing / as the slaves sang about it. We all have the right to believe that these verses of Miljković can only be sung in the Serbian language.
The mother tongue is therefore the one with the most music. Which is best sung with a guitar.
And one more thing: the mother tongue is the one in which the best amateur love songs are best courted and written.
The mother tongue is the one in which the funniest jokes are told.
The mother tongue is the one we mean.
The mother tongue is the one in which we will say the last words.
The mother tongue is the one in which we do not miss words even in the most crucial moments.
The mother tongue is the one into which we do not translate what we want to say.
The mother tongue is the one we are not ashamed of.
How many times on Sunday, February 21, when the International Mother Language Day was celebrated, did you thank someone in your mother tongue?
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