Prompt: Examine how the text is rhetorically designed in order to appeal to its intended audience.

            Language is one of the most universally powerful tools at our disposal. We use it in our daily lives to communicate with others, learn about the world, and express our cultures. There are roughly 6,500 languages spoken globally. Language can also be one of the most complicated concepts to understand. It might seem that there is only one “true” way to speak a language, say for example English, however the reality is that language isn’t always subjected to one standard version. “Mother Tongue”, an essay written by Amy Tan, uses anecdotes and perspective to reassure immigrant families that being limited in a language can limit people’s perceptions about you and that the way you use language can change around other people.

            The author of this text is Amy Tan, an established author that writes about Chinese American women immigrants. Born in Oakland, California on February 19, 1952, she studied English and Linguistics at San Jose State University, earning a B.A. in 1973 and M.A. in 1974. Tan, along with her mother, who is a Chinese immigrant, revisited China in 1987. There, she wrote The Joy Luck Club, which was published in 1989. She also wrote several other novels throughout her career, including The Kitchen God’s Wife in 1991, The Hundred Secret Senses in 1995, and Saving Fish from Drowning in 2005. The text “Mother’s Tongue” is a personal essay about how Tan’s mother struggles to properly communicate with other individuals outside of her family. Throughout the essay, she uses her experience with talking English with her mother to show how her English is fine the way it is.

Throughout “Mother Tongue”, Tan uses anecdotes to prove that the way you use language can change around different people. Tan gives a talk to a large group of people about her book The Joy Luck Club. Her mother was present in the room. In response, she says, “It was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her… it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.” Tan’s uses this experience to show how our social environment plays a big role in the way we speak. Often times, we tend to modify our words based on who we’re speaking to. For instance, we might say a lot of slang terms when around our friends but speak formal English when talking with coworkers.In the anecdote provided by Tan, she points out that her mother had heard her speak a different type of English for the first time. She made no grammatical errors, used a lot of sophisticated words, and several different types of standard conventions that she doesn’t use with her mother. Since she wasn’t at home, we can say that Tan felt it was most appropriate to switch up her words given the environment she was in. In addition to the time where she gave a talk to her book club, she also recalls the time when she was walking down the street with her mother. She describes the experience: “I again found myself conscious of the English I was using; the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: ‘Not waste money that way.’ My husband was with us as well, and he didn’t notice any switch in my English.” Previously, it was mentioned that she tends to use a lack of proper grammar when speaking with her mother. However, this doesn’t have to mean that she’s suddenly forgotten how to speak fluent English. Instead, she uses this unorthodox type of English as a way of being intimate with her mother. She’s been using it for long enough that her husband hardly noticed any difference when she made the switch to this “broken” language. Tan uses her personal experience to prove that your environment can impact the way you speak a language; we create multiple versions of a language within a language.

In addition to anecdotes, Tan adds perspective to “Mother Tongue” to prove that people’s perceptions about you can be limited by the way you speak a language. Tan describes how she used to be ashamed of her mother’s English and had limited perceptions about her. She states, “I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.”When she was a kid, Tan used to think that her mother’s limited English-speaking abilities reflected how much she knew about the world. The thought of her mother’s “broken” English, as other people label it, used to bother her. She claims that her mother’s experiences with staff at public places fueled this thought. Now she realizes that it’s unfair to judge someone’s character based on their language. The injustice that people did to her was motivated by the notion that her limited English reflected someone who understood very little.Tan also reflects on how she describes her mother’s English to everyone else: “Like others, I have described it to people as ‘broken’ or ‘fractured’ English… It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than ‘broken’, as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed… I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of the limited English speaker.” Tan believes that language does not have to be perfect because her mother’s variation of language makes sense to her, which is ultimately what matters since they communicate on a daily basis. There’s nothing “broken” about it because language is subjective, we interpret it based on what makes sense to us. Her mother might not be fluent or speak the “right” English, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be fixed. To her, that “broken” English, as people label it, is perfectly fine the way it is.By using her perspective, Tan is able to highlight the ways in which people can make false judgements about based on how you speak.

Language is a powerful means by which we communicate with other people and interact with our environment. However, it must be noted that it can also be a means by which people do injustice to others. In some settings, language can be used for different purposes, such as for intimacy at home. Nobody should be judgmental of one’s speaking abilities. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how a person speaks a language, as long as the people they use it with can comprehend the message of their speech.