Curiously, & and | are occasionally useful in Python. They do work properly with booleans, so the difference compared to "and" and "or" is that you don't get short circuiting, which in some very rare cases you might not want. ^ is less useful because it's almost the same as != (except stricter about types) - but it documents the intent more clearly.

In programming languages, does we have something akin to a mother-tongue?

There’s a fair bit of debate about the impact of learning specific programming styles as your first language. Quite a few people would argue that learning functional programming first is a benefit to understanding the concept of state and how to write clean code, even if you end up using something less pure.

Certainly, speaking as someone brought up on imperative and later OO code, it took a fair bit of unlearning to understand functional programming, and I still have no clue about type theory.