Amy Tan Mother Tongue Summary

Different Types of English
In the essay “Mother Tongue,” by Amy Tan, she claims to know more than one type of English. The different kinds of Englishes that she describes in her essay is a “proper”, Standard American English and a “broken”, informal English. She uses proper English when speaking publicly and uses the broken English for more casual settings, such as when she is talking with family or friends. However, are the different Englishes that she is referring to, actually separate languages or are they the same language said different due to misunderstanding or difficulty when learning the language?
Throughout the essay, the author, Amy Tan mentions her Chinese immigrant mother’s speech and how it has overall impacted her life. She

exclaims the way her mother speaks English as “broken” because according to her it sounds as if “it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness.” and most people who know her mother would agree. Overtime, she started to notice that her mother was not treated as well as the people who spoke proper English. From witnessing people disrespect her mother for her impaired language, the author would speak for her at times because whenever her mother did formulate some kind of remark, people would often be rude, ignore her, or even brush her off as unintelligent. Tan makes it clear that although her mother uses a broken language that does not mean that she does not know how to speak or understand proper English. Tan, also, talks about how she believes that because of this different type of English she uses with her mother and family, she has been limited to possibilities as a writer. She often found herself and others who spoke like her were pushed in another career direction, i.e Math or Science. For her, this actually ended up sparking her motive for wanting to be a writer. The author then goes on to the topic of using these different forms of English to less complicate writing and reading for certain people like her mother. Given the background and understanding where Tan is coming from, still makes me wonder if she is confused with what actually constitutes as a new language.
In the essay, Tan’s argument is not concrete, but from my understanding, she is saying that there are other types of Englishes besides the one used by most people today.

However, the one she refers to in her Essay seems more like a simplified version of English that her and her family uses either because it is their second learned language or because they are simply more comfortable using a less formal English in the comfort of their own home.The differences between a new language and the languages spoken about in Tan’s essay is structure. For the most part, a language is typically written or spoken in a structured manner. According to the Oxford English dictionary definition, language is “the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.” This is most likely so that a language can be easily understood or learned by people outside the community of people who use the language. I do not believe that the different forms of English Tan describes could be any more than just a spin on the language. “Slang” is more like how I would describe it. “A type of language that consists of words and phrases that are regarded as very informal, are more common in speech than writing, and are typically restricted to a particular context or group of people.”(Oxford English

Dictionaries).
Another term that can be used to describe the different Englishes used by Tan and her mother is ‘pidgin’. The lack of proper usage of grammar indicates that the different forms of English Tan refers to in her essay is most likely the result of her mother’s English being a pidgin form of English. Pidgin is “a simplified form of a language, especially used by a nonnative speaker” (OED). Meaning that the language she is using was not her first language and was probably developed poorly when transitioning from Chinese to English. Unlike her mother, Tan was younger when she began to learn English and her mother was already well into adulthood, so she was able to learn English much easier than her mother. This is most likely why Tan sees her mother's dialect as a choice and not due to her mother finding it hard to articulate what she is trying to convey in English.
According to Jeanette Gilsdorf, a professor in the Department of Information Systems at the College of Business Administration at California State University, “English changes through contact with other languages and through several other well-understood avenues of language evolution, such as compounding, adding affixes, functional shift, coinage, and so on” (Standard English Versus World Englishes). Knowing this information leads me to believe that English can change but it is still English and not a separate variation of English. Even though English may undergo changes overtime, that does not necessarily make it a new language. Although, English can evolve over time, it typically keeps its same structure and rules that keep it from straying too far from it origin.
In conclusion, Amy Tan spoke about how she knew several types of Englishes. These types of Englishes that she expressed were informal forms of English learned from the transitioning from one language to another. Tan claimed that these were two separate languages and the use of one of them caused people to be harsh or unpleasant and make the assumption that the person using the informal version of English was unintelligent. However, the Englishes that she described are not separate languages, but instead the same language. Overall, the informal way that Tan and her family spoke was like a pidgin version of English and is not separated from the English most English speakers use today.