Impeccable Broken English
The English language is one of the most complicated languages to master. We have so much slang, jargon and terminology within that it takes years to learn. The United States is full of immigrants that have learned English as a second language and have tried to master it the best way they know how. Accent, inflection and pronunciation usually comes most naturally to people that are born in the United States making it difficult for immigrants to sound as if they are natives. Americans tends to be impatient and judgmental towards immigrants when they sound garbled and unintelligible, trying to articulate their ideas. In her essay, “Mother Tongue”, Amy Tan relates how people often negatively perceive immigrants based poor articulation skills and she illustrates the manner in which they are discriminated against due to their “improper” use of the English language within the professional community that is used within the family as a sign of love and high regard. When people come in contact with working professionals, they tend to enhance the way they sound in order to come off as understandable, intelligent and someone who should be taken seriously. Immigrants have a more difficult time appe
While this is the way Tan grew up, she had the sense not to use it with anyone that did not speak that way to her in the same manner. Tan only spoke “simply” when she was speaking to her mother or even with her husband. She claims that “it had become [their] language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk [and] the language [Tan] grew up with.” (125). For Tan’s family, speaking in such a way gave them comfort because they knew that the outside world would not be grammatically correcting them and disregarding as if they were the village idiot. No one in Tan’s family would be discriminated against and not listened to just because they did not say something right or that they forgot a word. If society has supposedly come so far as accepting people for who they are and not being discriminatory, then they need to start listening better because that is all it takes to understand “broken” English. Another example of discrimination due to a person’s non-standard language skills is when Tan’s mother was trying to “find out about a benign brain tumor CAT scan” (127) that had been revealed the month prior. Tan’s mother was having a difficult time trying to get information from the doctor’s office. She kept telling the nurses to call her daughter and she would explain everything but they would continuously ignore her. This went on for some time before the office called Tan. Low and behold, “when the doctor finally called [Tan], who spoke in perfect Engl
Some topics in this essay:
Tan Low,
English Tan,
Tongue” Tan,
Amy Tan,
English English,
Shirley McLain’s,
english language,
tan’s mother,
Street Week,
perfect english,
learn english language,
people learn english,
tan grew,
learn english,
people learn,
called tan,
family environment,
“mother tongue”,
immigrants sound,
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Approximate Word count = 1027
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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