Mother tongue

In 1910 enumerators wrote the mother tongue after the country of birth, as Russ.-Lithuanian or Switz.-German, for each foreign-born person and each foreign-born parent. The 1920 census gave it separate columns for the person, the father and the mother, and 1930 asked it of the foreign born only.

The language often says more than the country. The 1910 instructions gave the example of a person born in Russia whose mother tongue was Lithuanian, and 1930 enumerators were told not to accept Austrian or Hungarian as a mother tongue but to ask which language, such as German or Magyar, was actually spoken.