Tan And Fought Argument Analysis

Depending on where you live or where you are from, there was probably a different dialect in the way they spoke the language. In the South, for example, we from the West think they have an accent and vice versa. It is a distinction of different societies within a nation. Sometimes, this can be good and other times it can be not as good. Nowadays, we are getting increasingly more of different types of culture and languages in our country.. After reviewing Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and Carmen Fought’s “Language as a Representation of Mexican American Identity,” Tan and Fought agree that non-standard English speakers frequently engage in code-switching, and they argue that standard English speakers need to be more sensitive to and appreciative

Fought describes “Standard English” as “difficult to define” (Fought 45). Later in the same paragraph, she explains that the “middle-class Mexican Americans usually have access to a variety of this type” (Fought 45). Her example that she uses is of kids (Mexican-American) that go to school and speak differently there than they would normally do at home (Fought 45). Tan’s experience agrees with what Fought is arguing. She realized that she was speaking with what she had learned from school. She writes, “it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases – all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother” (Tan 394-95). A couple of sentences later she describes how she gained consciousness of the type of English she uses normally with her mother in a public setting. Undenounced to her husband, he did not notice one bit, due to the fact that he had been used to it (Fought 395). Here, it appears that Tan is so used to speaking in a particular way that she does not recognize how she is speaking sometimes. She presumably must consciously tell herself to change the way she talks. This profoundly shows the difference in public and private settings of how non-standard

Fought implies that “as immigrants from Mexico came to California and other parts of the Southwest, communities developed in which many people spoke a non-native English marked by sounds and grammatical constructions from their first language, Spanish. The children of these immigrants grew up using this English as a native language, so it became regular and rule-governed, like all native varieties” (Fought 45). It appears that Fought is saying the exact thing that Tan is saying, only using different words. With Mexicans coming into the United States, they picked up certain parts of the English language within their community. But in some cases, they had to have their children do most of the public speaking for them because they didn’t know the English that well and they did, since they went to school. This also brings back “code-switching” most certainly. It appears clearly that Fought has an agreeing view with Tan that anyone, including children from immigrant families, are not too old to learn new