We can all agree that global languages such as English or Spanish build bridges between people. They give us the opportunity to understand each other better and create a world where we can stay connected. We can agree that through languages we expand ourselves. We find out things about us that maybe we wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for those additional languages we learned. However, our mother tongues, the ones that live so deep within us, don’t simply help us communicate: they help us feel, remember and belong. It is the native language we were named in, the language that shaped how we understand care, comfort and connection. While global languages open doors outward, the native language turns us inward, anchoring us to memory, identity and community.
Think about the way your name sounds when someone really cares about you. And now think again. You can’t tell me you didn’t feel anything.
Your mother tongue is where your emotions live
It’s impossible not to have thought at least one time, when talking in another language than your native one, “this has more sense in my language” or “this is funnier in my language, i swear!” or even “I AM funnier in my language, I promise!”. Even if you are able to study in English, order a coffee in Spanish and maybe survive in French (learning the first word in French from Dexter’s Laboratory - it’s not possible to forget omelette de fromage), the way your mom was singing lullabies before sleep time or your grandpa’s bad jokes will always have a special place in your heart.
“I don’t miss my country, but my language. I sometimes have nostalgia for my mother tongue” (Sprachweh).
Being homesick for your mother tongue is a real phenomenon. It’s not easy to fully express yourself in another language, not everything is translatable. Sometimes it can feel like you’re replacing a part of you with something else, it can even feel like a betrayal, but how can we accept that we are allowed to be more than just one thing?
It’s important not to forget where you’re coming from. To understand that you might feel your emotions more authentically in your mother tongue because, indeed, this is how you learned to embody them. Emotions stick the strongest to the language we learned them in. Think about the words your parents used when they were proud of you, your first “I love you” or when you told someone how sorry you are for doing something wrong. This is not only vocabulary, this is emotional memory. It’s how you learned for the first time to speak from your heart, to translate your soul.
Feeling emotions is part of the human experience and it’s worth celebrating that we can translate them into words. If you think about your favorite author who writes in your native language, can you tell how their writing hits different spots in your brain?
It’s not coincidence, it’s the power the mother tongue has - the capability to touch you in a way a foreign language cannot (maybe only unless you master it like a native).
Community and belonging
The mother tongue is like a lens through which humans understand life. That’s why translation can communicate meaning, but it cannot transfer experience. For example, when a language has a word that doesn’t exist anywhere else, it usually means one thing: the experience was special enough to name it. Languages and vocabulary are never random, they appear because something it’s so common and meaningful in a community that it needs to be named. It’s like pointing out what the society is paying attention to, what is important enough to receive a specific word or phrase for it.
Mother tongue preserves cultural knowledge across generations. From “simple” stories to proverbs, rituals and traditional wisdom, using the same language that has been constantly used and passed on through generations, it allows elders especially to transfer knowledge authentically, strengthening intergenerational bonds and continuity within community.
The truth is that people connect more deeply in the language they grew up speaking. It’s more vulnerable to talk about your feelings in your native language (especially when you are multilingual). If we take a situation that is sensitive for you, it will probably be easier to speak about it in English or in any other second language you speak than in your native one. Why? Because, as previously mentioned, your emotions live in your home language, while the other languages you learned are more like neurological, analytical paths and processes that have reduced cultural conditioning.
With this in mind, the mother tongue creates community precisely in moments of vulnerability. Carrying deep emotional resonance shaped by childhood, family and lived experience, the mother tongue is the one through which individuals share fears, grief or intimate thoughts in a more profound way.
Connection is what makes us stick together and connecting through your mother tongue is a way to build what we crave and need as human beings: community. If you travelled before or maybe even lived in a foreign country, you know the feeling when you randomly meet someone from home and you just cannot help it but be excited that you can finally talk in your mother tongue. It just comes so natural and you can feel how much you missed this.
Language as resistance
Speaking your native language is choosing to be seen. Is choosing visibility over assimilation. Choosing to not shrink yourself to fit in, to not become “something else” just in order to be similar to the others is a real act of resistance. Using your native language makes your culture visible in the public space, keeps it alive, especially in the context we live in today. English might have taken over but it doesn’t mean that this important part of our culture, our native language, has to be forgotten or erased, but on the contrary: continuing to speak your mother tongue allows you to belong while remaining distinct.
To speak YOUR language in a world that is more and more pressuring for everybody to be the same it’s a huge act of visibility and courage. It’s choosing memory over silence, refusing to erase an identity that exists within you from the scratch, from the upbringing.
Refusing to hide your native language is refusing cultural shame. Hiding a language often comes from the belief that it’s “lesser” but obviously this is not true. We live in such a multi-cultural world, it would be a shame to trade it only because some people consider other languages “more important”. Language is a big part of a cultural identity, we don’t need to speak only perfect English or French or German in order to be respected and seen.
As we said before, we can integrate more parts within ourselves, without erasing others. Imagine cutting the part that shaped you in your definitory years, who would you be now without it? You wouldn’t be YOU anymore!
Remaining “loyal” to your mother tongue shows dignity. Being proud of your culture is not stubbornness, it’s preservation. It also reveals how diverse we are and continues the idea that everybody has their place in the world and deserves to be accepted. Cherishing your mother language is a very daring attempt to display the real scene we all actually exist in. Keep going and put a smile on your face while doing it, own it!
Conclusion
Our mother tongue is both a home and a form of self-expression. It’s within how our thoughts arrive without effort and where our emotions don’t need permission to exist. Here we have all the voices and the memories that shaped and softened us, not to mention the meanings we never had to explain. We could just feel them, let them out and we would be understood right away. When I think about my mother tongue, I like to think about this joke my dad always liked to make: “You woke up like a fly in milk”. You didn’t get it, right? Exactly my point. Just trust me, it has more meaning for me and it does make more sense in my native language.