For those who have grown up multilingual, many find a special attachment to their first language, which is often deeply intertwined with self-identity. This bond can sometimes be challenged, especially for those who immigrated to a different country, and gradually lose touch with their native language. Julie Sedivy, the author of “The Strange Persistence of First Languages,” experienced the feeling of being disconnected from her Czech heritage. However, Sedivy found a way back to it, driven by a desire to reconnect with her roots. Just like how Sedivy felt when a turning point in her life made her realize that her childhood started fading away, it has reminded me to maintain a connection to my first language and never forget my roots. After …show more content…
Sedivy herself writes, “While my father was still alive, I was, like most young people, more intent on hurtling myself into my future than on tending to my ancestral roots” (Sedivy 3). This quote reflects a common experience among young people who prioritize their future ambitions over their ancestor roots. This also shows that Sedivy realizes the importance of her ancestral roots and the missed opportunity to engage with them while her father was still alive. My time with my dad was always split after my parents separated, and moving away from Indonesia for college only widened that gap. Additionally, according to Sedivy, “You lose the embrace of an entire community or nation for whom your family’s odd quirks are not quirks at all. You lose your context” (Sev. 6). Basically, Sedivy is saying that losing a common language that you share with your family not only creates a barrier to communication, but also a sense of belonging to a community that shares one's background and identity. Similarly, after my dad passed away two years ago, I realized there’s still a part of him I want to know more about. Every time I moved onto a new chapter in my life, I felt that I had become more distant from my
The writings of Amy Tan and Richard Rodriguez’s depicts a bilingual story based on two differing culture. On Mother Tongue, “Tan explores the effect of her mother’s “broken” English on her life and writing” (506). On the other hand, Richard Rodriguez “recounts the origin of his complex views of bilingual education through Public and Private Language” (512). From a child’s eyes, Tan and Rodriguez describe each joys and pain growing up in a non-English speaking family. Hence, may be viewed that cultural differences plays a major role on how one handles adversities.
“Se Habla Español,” is written by a Latin author, Tanya Barrientos; and Amy Tan, a Chinese author, wrote “Mother Tongue”. In both literate narratives the authors write about their experiences with language and how it impacted their lives. In This essay we will be discussing the similarities as well as the differences in the stories and the authors of “Se Habla Español” and “Mother Tongue”. We will discuss how both authors use a play on words in their titles, how language has impacted their lives, how struggling with language has made them feel emotionally, and how both authors dealt with these issues.
Growing up around those who had just emigrated from the former Soviet Union helped me become aware of how important the process of acquiring language can be – both for my parents and for myself. My family, speaking both Russian and Bukharian, barely spoke any English, but they were still determined to learn the language as soon as possible. As my mom sat in front of a television, pausing every few seconds to test her pronunciation, my fascination for the adaptation of speech and language began. I became further fascinated when watching old home videos of myself struggling between the three languages that I grew up surrounded by.
Even though the dominance of a language can allow for the loss of a culture, it can also bring awareness. In schools, local community centers and other various places, foreign languages are taught, not only do non-native speakers take on these languages but native speakers do as well to keep their culture. By doing so it “revitalizes cultures and cultural artifacts through foreign influences, technologies, and markets.” (Gerdes
Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue is divided into five sections and an epilogue. The first three parts of the text present Mary/ María’s, the narrator, recollection of the time when she was nineteen and met José Luis, a refuge from El Salvador, for the first time. The forth and fifth parts, chronologically, go back to her tragic experience when she was seven years old and then her trip to El Salvador with her son, the fruit of her romance with José Luis, twenty years after she met José Luis. And finally the epilogue consists a letter from José Luis to Mary/ María after her trip to El Salvador. The essay traces the development of Mother Tongue’s principal protagonists, María/ Mary. With a close reading of the text, I argue how the forth chapter, namely the domestic abuse scene, functions as a pivotal point in the Mother Tongue as it helps her to define herself.
Language is an important part of who we are. It influences the way we think and behave on a great scale. However, sometimes it is forced upon us to go in different directions just so we can physically and mentally feel as if we belong to the society in which we live in. Just as we see in Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and Richard Rodriguez’s “A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, both authors faced some challenges along the way by coping with two different languages, while still trying to achieve the social position which they desired.
Originally born in Moscow, Russia, I came to the United States fourteen years ago with my parents along with my unrelated brother as their newly adopted children. Transitioning to a new country can be hard, but not knowing the language is even harder. For the first few years of my life, I struggled to speak, write and read any English. Since then, I have become acclimated to the American culture and state of mind and learned English proficiently, but, lost touch with my mother tongue because I spoke minimal Russian. I have always been proud to acknowledge and tell others that I am adopted from Mother Russia. However, over the past several years my curiosity and desire to learn about my native homeland have increased significantly. My interest in the Russian language reignited last year when I overheard a Russian and Kazakh having a conversation in Russian. I soon found myself listening to anyone anywhere, who spoke Russian.
For more than 300 years, immigrants from every corner of the globe have settled in America, creating the most diverse and heterogeneous nation on Earth. Though immigrants have given much to the country, their process of changing from their homeland to the new land has never been easy. To immigrate does not only mean to come and live in a country after leaving your own country, but it also means to deal with many new and unfamiliar situations, social backgrounds, cultures, and mainly with the acquisition and master of a new language. This often causes mixed emotions, frustration, awkward feelings, and other conflicts. In Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, the author describes the social, cultural and linguistic difficulties encountered in America as he attempts to assimilate to the American culture. Richard Rodriguez by committing himself to speaking English, he lost his cultural ties, family background and ethnic heritage.
Most people who grow up with a foreign language spoken in there house grow up with an advantage in society. This advantage can only occur once the individual learning that foreign language also learns the dominant language spoken in that country. Once both of these languages are learned and mastered, the individual has now placed them se...
It is important to maintain children’s home language as it may help them learn and understand a second language. Barratt-Pugh (2000) discusses the benefits of bilingualism and maintaining it through early childhood settings, also mentions the concerns families have for their children maintaining two languages through schooling. Research within the article states that children who speak more than one language will have a higher level of understanding literacy content, form, genre, as well as understand the differences and translating within both languages. This demonstrates a contrast of strengths and experiences with literacy (linguist...
English is an invisible gate. Immigrants are the outsiders. And native speakers are the gatekeepers. Whether the gate is wide open to welcome the broken English speakers depends on their perceptions. Sadly, most of the times, the gate is shut tight, like the case of Tan’s mother as she discusses in her essay, "the mother tongue." People treat her mother with attitudes because of her improper English before they get to know her. Tan sympathizes for her mother as well as other immigrants. Tan, once embarrassed by her mother, now begins her writing journal through a brand-new kaleidoscope. She sees the beauty behind the "broken" English, even though it is different. Tan combines repetition, cause and effect, and exemplification to emphasize her belief that there are more than one proper way (proper English) to communicate with each other. Tan hopes her audience to understand that the power of language- “the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth”- purposes to connect societies, cultures, and individuals, rather than to rank our intelligence.
Despite growing up amidst a language deemed as “broken” and “fractured”, Amy Tan’s love for language allowed her to embrace the variations of English that surrounded her. In her short essay “Mother Tongue”, Tan discusses the internal conflict she had with the English learned from her mother to that of the English in her education. Sharing her experiences as an adolescent posing to be her mother for respect, Tan develops a frustration at the difficulty of not being taken seriously due to one’s inability to speak the way society expects. Disallowing others to prove their misconceptions of her, Tan exerted herself in excelling at English throughout school. She felt a need to rebel against the proverbial view that writing is not a strong suit of someone who grew up learning English in an immigrant family. Attempting to prove her mastery of the English language, Tan discovered her writing did not show who she truly was. She was an Asian-American, not just Asian, not just American, but that she belonged in both demographics. Disregarding the idea that her mother’s English could be something of a social deficit, a learning limitation, Tan expanded and cultivated her writing style to incorporate both the language she learned in school, as well as the variation of it spoken by her mother. Tan learned that in order to satisfy herself, she needed to acknowledge both of her “Englishes” (Tan 128).
The purpose of Amy Tan’s essay, “Mother Tongue,” is to show how challenging it can be if an individual is raised by a parent who speaks “limited English” (36) as Tan’s mother does, partially because it can result in people being judged poorly by others. As Tan’s primary care giver, her mother was a significant part of her childhood, and she has a strong influence over Tan’s writing style. Being raised by her mother taught her that one’s perception of the world is heavily based upon the language spoken at home. Alternately, people’s perceptions of one another are based largely on the language used.
...xpressing her Chinese culture. Mastering a second language allows her to articulate her and her mother’s thoughts; it is a foundation for her pride and a foundation to express herself. For Gloria Anzaldua, instead of choosing one language over the other, she chose a mix of the two and fights for it. She realized the value of her language when she lost it and now treasures it. The kind of Spanish she speaks is neither English nor Spanish, but both. It is overflowing with culture from Medieval Spain, France, Germany, etc., just from the origins of the words. It is her pride and a representation of herself, fighting and living. In conclusion, in addition to Lera Boroditsky’s article proving that the structure of language affects how we think, the articles by Eric Liu, Amy Tan, and Gloria Anzaldua show how language is a foundation for a person’s culture, pride, and self.
Language has pioneered many interracial relationships and historical milestones. Language is a necessity for basic communication and cultural diversity. Being multilingual is a skill proven influential to a successful future. Due to rapid globalization, countries all over the world are stressing the importance of learning a second, or even third, language. With the exception of time and lack of resources, adults have very few widely applicable disadvantages to learning multiple languages. However, language learning as a child presents more complications. Some of those include not having enough funding at the elementary school level to introduce a program for secondary language, academic overload for the youth, stress for both the parent and student parties, and the mixing of languages. Not all of these complications are true in any or all situations, however, and the absence of them provides multitudes of opportunity for future career and academic success. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the parents or the education legislation to decide whether they encourage the learning of a secondary language at the young age necessary for retention. “The general consensus is that it takes between five to seven years for an individual to achieve advanced fluency,” therefore the younger a child begins to learn, the more likely they are to benefit to the maximum potential (Robertson). Keeping the language learning in high school or beginning the process earlier is a greatly controversial discussion that is important to address because of the topic’s already lengthy suspension.