Meet Mothertongue — Vocabulary in your mother tongue, one card a day
Mothertongue is a vocabulary practice app for diaspora children — and curious adults — who want to keep a parent or grandparent's language alive.
Education
Mothertongue
Vocabulary in your mother tongue, one card a day.
Every feature, from the first launch.
No account, no login, no cloud. Everything runs on your device and works fully offline — nothing in this post is hidden behind a wall.
What Mothertongue does
Mothertongue is a vocabulary practice app for diaspora children — and curious adults — who want to keep a parent or grandparent's language alive. v1 ships three under-served languages: Yoruba (Nigeria + diaspora), Tagalog (Philippines + diaspora), and Marathi (India + diaspora). Each language ships 600 carefully selected words (kitchen, family, body, weather, work, faith, market, neighborhood). Cards include written form, transliteration, and on-device AVSpeechSynthesizer audio.
What's in v1:
— Daily 10-card session: spaced-repetition queue with calm pacing. No streaks. No timers. The session takes 5 minutes. — Audio pronunciation: AVSpeechSynthesizer reads each word in the right locale (yo, tl, mr). Tap to repeat. Slow down toggle. — Themed decks: family, kitchen, body, weather, market, work, faith, neighborhood — 8 decks × 75 words per language. — Sentence builder: tap 3-5 words to compose a sentence; the app speaks it. Useful for saying 'where are the keys' the way grandma did. — Listening practice: the app reads a short word, you tap which one of four candidates it was. Calm rhythm. — Progress is yours: per-language progress lives on this phone. No leaderboards.
Free. The three languages are all included.
A look inside
Tap any screenshot to open the full-resolution version.
What's inside
- Daily 10-card session — Spaced repetition, calm pacing.
- Themed decks — 8 per language.
- Sentence builder — Compose + speak.
- Listening practice — 4-choice quick test.
Why we built it
UNESCO: 3,000+ languages at risk. 7,000 living languages, voice AI works for ~30. Duolingo's bandwidth is limited; smaller languages are side projects (Navajo, Hawaiian). The diaspora-side-of-the-app is genuinely uncrowded for Yoruba, Tagalog, Marathi.
What makes it different
Mothertongue is the only iOS app combining (a) 3 under-served languages with hand-curated 600-word decks, (b) on-device AVSpeechSynthesizer with the right locale, (c) calm pacing (no streaks/leaderboards). Duolingo + Babbel skip these languages or offer them as side projects. Te Hiku Media is Māori-only.
Who it's for
Students, parents helping with homework, and adults who just want a fast answer without an upsell.
In one line: Vocabulary in your mother tongue, one card a day.
Try it
See the Mothertongue app page for the full feature list, the info table, and support links.
Use Mothertongue, found a bug, or have a feature request? Comments are open below — anonymous is fine.
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