People may speak the same languages, but their styles and tongues are different. The differences come from several sources, and mostly come from who are closed to you. These people’s ways of talking affect you, your style, your tongue, and your own language. This is what Amy Tan told about in her story “Mother Tongue”, how she ended up writing all her work with her mother in mind as the reader, and how all the Englishes she grew up with influenced her life. “Mother Tongue” was written to show that we shouldn’t judge people by their imperfect language instead of their beautiful side.
Amy Tan open her essay by stating, “I am not a scholar of English or literature,” then state, in the next paragraph, “I am a writer”, why did she say that? Because English language is so different between each person, that’s why she can’t give her readers anything else except for her own language and opinions. On the other hand, she uses all her Englishes to write and to show people how powerful language is, what can they do or affect the reader – evoking emotion, a visual image, complex idea or simple truth – “Language is the tool of my trade”. Amy Tan always loved language.
As we go further, Amy Tan realized she has been speaking different englishes to different group of people. She didn’t use the standard English – “the intersection of memory upon with her” and “there is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus” - at home with her mother, and when she switch her English – “not waste money that way” - she saw her husband didn’t notice that either. People who live with each other or seeing each other often tend to have their own common language, which may has many different styles and tongues, may sounds wrong to the outsiders but normal to the insiders. She constructs a view showing the reader the vast differences between language at home and language in public.
Amy Tan described her mother as a “broken English” speaker, the source of embarrassment when she went out...