and mothers alone have understood the first babblings of humanity, they have waited long to be remembered in the worthiest name of the language they have taught their offspring.
The term mother-tongue, although Middle English had "birthe-tonge," in the sense of native speech, is not old in our language; the Century Dictionary gives no examples of its early use. Even immortal Shakespeare does not know it, for, in King Richard II., he makes Mowbray say:—
"The language I have learned these forty years
(My native English) now must I forego."
The German version of the passage has, however, mein mütterliches
Englisch.
Cowper, in the Task, does use "mother-tongue," in the connection following:—
"Praise enough
To fill the ambition of a private man,
That Chatham's language was his mother-tongue."
Mother-tongue has now become part and parcel of our common speech; a good word, and a noble one.
In Modern High German, the corresponding Mutterzunge, found in Sebastian Franck (sixteenth century) has gradually given way to Muttersprache, a word whose history is full of interest. In Germany, as in Europe generally, the esteem in which Latin was held in the Middle Ages and the centuries immediately following them, forbade almost entirely the birth or extension of praiseworthy and endearing names for the speech of the common people of the country. So long as men spoke of "hiding the beauties of Latin in homely German words," and a Bacon could think of writing his chief work in Latin, in order that he might be remembered after his death, it were vain to expect aught else.
Hence, it does not surprise us to learn that the word Muttersprache is not many centuries old in German. Dr. Lübben, who has studied its history, says it is not to be found in Old High German or Middle High German (or Middle Low German), and does not appear even in Luther's works, though, judging from a certain passage in his Table Talk, it was perhaps known to him. It was only in the seventeenth century that the word became quite common. Weigand states that it was already in the Dictionarium latino-germanicum (Zurich, 1556), and in Maaler's Die Teutsch Spraach (Zurich, 1561), in which latter work (S. 262 a) we meet with the expressions vernacula lingua, patrius sermo, landspraach, muoterliche spraach, and muoterspraach (S. 295 c). Opitz (1624) uses the word, and it is found in Schottel's Teutsche Haupt-Sprache (Braunschweig, 1663). Apparently the earliest known citation is the Low German modersprake, found in the introduction of Dietrich Engelhus' (of Einbeck) Deutsche Chronik (1424).
Nowadays Muttersprache is found everywhere in the German book-language, but Dr. Lübben, in 1881, declared that he had never heard it from the mouth of the Low German folk, with whom the word was always lantsprake, gemene sprake. Hence, although the word has been immortalized by Klaus Groth, the Low German Burns, in the first poem of his Quickborn:—