ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the changes that the organic metaphors of lactation and cultivation went through in times of nations and national languages. The notion of a unique mother-tongue directly emanating from the body of the mother sanctions the first language acquired in infancy and childhood as the single and only possible locus of affection. The “manufactured proximity” of language and mother that came about at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century has to be seen within a broader historical and discursive context that includes the redefinition of the notion of family in exclusively biological terms. The primers that were published in the early sixteenth century during the Reformation period also made use of animal imagery but with a completely different intent. The metaphors of the matrix and embeddedness describe relationships between languages in terms of gender and reiterate the idea of mother-tongues and national languages as encircled spaces.
