I believe she titled it this way because she was going into specifics about how her mother spoke, and because no one speaks he same English as another person she specified and made it known she was referring to her mother’s usage of the language. Also, we learned throughout the essay her mom had difficulties getting her point across, or being understood because of her limited ability to speak English, with that being said I think Tan intentionally made the title grammatically incorrect. Rather than “Mother’s Tongue,” she titles it, “Mother Tongue. As for the singularity of “tongue” in the title, this is due to the belief that no one speaks the same English, and if the title were, “tongues,” it would be wrong and would mean ther people use the same English. Of her mother’s English, Tan writes, “That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world. ” How was the effect of her mother’s English positive and how was it negative? Draw a parallel to your own life. Who, or what, was significant in shaping your various Englishes?
After reading Amy Tan’s essay one could easily say that her mother’s English helped her, but also hindered her. Tan’s mother’s English helped her because she had to learn the language enough to be understood hen being an interpreter for her mother. Her mother’s English was also a reality to Tan; she noticed that her friends couldn’t understand her, and she was embarrassed when people could not comprehend the things her mother was saying, so she found it in herself to avoid the same situation and improve her English.
Tan’s mother hindered her when it came to test such as IQ achievement test, and the SAT, because she did not have a mere model of how the English language is to be spoken. l, very much like Tan came from a home where broken English is spoken. My family is Trinidadian, so although English is our first language we also see Patois, which is broken English. Patois was the language most spoken in our home and even in school because my siblings were so close to me in age, we attended middle and high school at the same time.
But my mom married a very intellectual man, and this changed the way we spoke in significant ways. My step-dad didn’t allow us to speak broken English as often, and encourage reading and speaking with a proper tongue, and my mother was on the bang- wagon. This makes my step- dad a major influence because had he not come into our lives can’t see myself ever being TABLE to properly.
