Mother Tongue, by Amy Tan

This week in class we analysed and discussed in groups the essay Mother Tongue by Amy Tan. In the essay Mother Tongue, Amy Tan describes that the kind of English that her mother uses is normally seen as "broken or incorrect" English. Throughout the text, Amy Tan expresses her experience of being an English speaker in a Chinese family and what stereotypes the English world has made about non-native English speakers. Some stereotypes about non-native speakers would be about how they seem less educated. They may seem uneducated to native English speakers when they live in a native English country because they wouldn't know the country's language that you are living in and that could be a major disadvantage to the non-native speakers as it would be harder for them to communicate with others if the English that they spoke wasn't proper.

In the poem, Tan talks about how language is very powerful and how it is her tool of trade.

She talks about the different types of English that she grew up with and how she uses all of them. She also talks about how she believes that her mother’s English is perfect and natural as it is her mother tongue and her mother tongue is the "language that helped shape the way [she] saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world." Amy Believes that her mother's English perfect even though when she asked her friends what they thought of her mother’s English most said that they could only understand 50% or less of what Amy's Mother was saying. The mother tongue is important it is because it is the language you should know since birth (or at least supposed to know in my case). I believe that her Mother started to learn Cantonese English in order to make sure that their children will be successful in school, will have some understanding of English so that Amy would be able to speak English and have a small understanding so that she would be successful when she started school and go on to eventually become an English Major as she is today.

When I was younger I used to speak a lot of Urdu in the house until the time that I started school as I had started to learn English and at that time my parents also started to use English around the house. Although they could speak English fluently I was starting to lose my grasp on my mother tongue as I gradually stopped using it altogether until I eventually forgot it. These days I can still understand what my parents say on the dinner table as they started to use Urdu but I cannot speak Urdu as well as I used to.

Amy and I have two very different scenarios but at the same time are somewhat alike. For her she never forgot her mother tongue as was struggling to grasp onto the English language whereas in the process of me learning English I have forgotten how speak Urdu.


Sources 

- https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/dll/cresource/q2/p03/
- http://jikwonkim0930.blogspot.ae/2015/09/stereotypes-of-non-native-english.html
- http://melinalev.blogspot.ae/2014/09/stereotypes-of-non-native-english.html
- http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/exploring-language-identity-mother-910.html 
- http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01434630802651677?journalCode=rmmm20