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Broken Language In Mother Tongue By Amy Tan

1151 Words5 Pages

In “Mother Tongue”, author Amy Tan makes the claim that more people should learn to embrace what may be a broken language as just another version of the language. Often those who speak with limited English skills are falsely determined to be lazy or unintelligent, and worse, as unimportant. Tan specifically makes her point about Asian-Americans and their families, using her own firsthand experiences to back up her claim which she made quite effectively. I agree with a lot of the points she makes in her article partially because most of the examples she gives I can relate to from my own observations. Mother Tongue doesn’t just have to be for speakers of “broken” English or Asian-Americans, it’s something that many other-Americans can relate …show more content…

Tan herself states, “…when I was growing up, my mother's "limited " English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly, her thoughts were imperfect”. Even though her mother should be called smart or willful for attempting to learn a second language, she didn’t know it well enough to considered accomplished. She was often ridiculed for her short-comings to the point her own child looked at her the …show more content…

IT’s imperfect or even incorrect in some places but mostly, it’s just a simplistic understanding of how English works. It’s still clear enough to understand if more people took the time to and it’s the first language she learned from her mother. She looked back at her own work and saw the overly worded and strict grammar, a way she only talked around certain people but never her mother. She realized that this English isn’t bad either, but neither is her mother tongue. While slightly wrong, it’s how she learned English and gained her love of the language to the point that she knew she wanted to write professionally. It’s the bad name given to “broken” English that pushes more Asian-American students away from pursuing English degrees or writing

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