ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the metaphors of the adoptive and the stepmother tongue and their relationship to mother-tongues. Leo Spitzer described English, the language of adoption that he used for his academic writing after having migrated to the United States, as an ungenerous stepmother opposing it to his beloved German mother-tongue. In a completely different vein, Tawada describes her relationship to the new adoptive German mother-tongue as a chance to rediscover the Japanese mother-tongue through the eyes of a second language. Yildiz (2012) explores different ways in which the family romance of the monolingual paradigm can be rewritten. Besides Franz Kafka, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Theodor W. Adorno she also discusses the work of Yoko Tawada. The last section of the chapter deals with the notion of the stepmother tongue as another way of deterritorializing the ideological concept of the mother-tongue
