Other forms: tongues
The tongue is the soft muscular part inside your mouth that tastes food. Stick out your tongue, bite your tongue, mother tongue.
It is a bundle of muscles with no bone, and it does the work of tasting, swallowing and shaping every sound of speech — which is why tongue means language too: mother tongue, native tongue, speaking in tongues. The map of taste regions on the tongue is a myth. Note hold your tongue; tongue in cheek; and a slip of the tongue.
1nountongueThe soft muscular part inside the mouth.
“The doctor asked me to stick out my tongue and say ah.”
2nounlanguageA language.
“Her mother tongue is Polish, but she speaks perfect English.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
tongue is a body part, or a language.
Old English tunge goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root that also gives Latin lingua, whence language. Tongue and lingua are the same word at a great distance.
Proto-Indo-European
*dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s — tongue
Proto-Germanic
*tungǭ — tongue
Proto-West Germanic
*tungā — tongue
Old English
tunge
Middle English
tongue
English, today
tongue
From Middle English tongue, a late spelling of tonge, tunge, from Old English tunge, from Proto-West Germanic tungā (“tongue”), from Proto-Germanic tungǭ (“tongue”), from Proto-Indo-European dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s (“tongue”). a doublet of langue and lingua. 2 Germanic: West Frisian tonge, Dutch tong, {{cog|lb|
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA