The various dialects have some variants of _Muttersprache_, and in Göttingen we meet with _moimen spraken_, where _moime_ (cognate with Modern High German _Muhme_, "aunt"), signifies "mother," and is a child-word.
From the _mother-tongue_ to the _mother-land_ is but a step. As the speech she taught her babe bears the mother's name, so does also the land her toil won from the wilderness.
As we say in English most commonly "native city," so also we say "native land." Even Byron sings:--
"Adieu, adieu I my native shore Fades o'er the waters blue;
and Fitz-Greene Halleck, in his patriotic poem "Marco Bozzaris," bids strike "For God, and your native land."
"Breathes there a man with soul so dead, Who never to himself has said, This is my own, my native land!"
and Smith's national hymn, "My country,'tis of thee," know no _mother-land_.
In the great _Century Dictionary_, the only illustration cited of the use of the word _mother-land_ is a very recent one, from the _Century Magazine_ (vol. xxix. p. 507).
Shakespeare, however, comes very near it, when, in _King John_ (V. ii.), he makes the Bastard speak of "your dear Mother-England," --but this is not quite "mother-land."
In German, though, through the sterner influences which surrounded the Empire in its birth and reorganization, _Vaterland_ is now the word, _Mutterland_ was used by Kant, Wieland, Goethe, Herder, Uhland, etc. Lippert suggests an ingenious explanation of the origin of the terms _Mutterland_, _Vaterland_, as well as for the predominance of the latter and younger word. If, in primitive times, man alone could hold property,--women even and children were his chattels,--yet the development of agriculture and horticulture at the hands of woman created, as it were, a new species of property, property in land, the result of woman's toil and labour; and this new property, in days when "mother-right" prevailed, came to be called _Mutterland_, as it was essentially "mothers' land." But when men began to go forth to war, and to conquer and acquire land that was not "mothers' land," a new species of landed property,--the "land of the conquering father,"--came into existence (and with it a new theory of succession, "father-right"), and from that time forward "Vaterland" has extended its signification, until it has attained the meaning which it possesses in the German speech of to-day (492. 33, 36).