In “The African Writer and the English Language,” Chinua Achebe writes: “The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.” Would you agree with this claim? Respond on the basis of our discussion of the texts in class so far, paying special attention to Riders to the Sea, A Small Place, and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. “I feel that English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.” Languages are of a fluid and static nature. They draw from various origins, and grow constantly, changing with trends and tongues. A world language must …show more content…
Mother tongues are so deeply ingrained in a person that it is practically impossible to stop it from interweaving with any second language. It would be quite a feat to be able to express feelings without using words of the very country that evokes these. Though it may be hard to find direct examples in any text or story, the text itself often proves this point. Riders To The Sea by J.M. Synge seems practically illegible because of the strong Irish influence that pervades it so deeply. In A Small Place, the author Jamaica Kincaid conveys her distress over the fact that the natives can only express themselves in the language of those who colonised and suppressed them. This language, however, is still far from perfect. Despite the colonisers intentions and the natives efforts, the resulting language is a love-child of what was and what would have been. As seen in You Can’t Get Lost In Cape Town, the story Bowl Like Hole shows the natives fascination with the colonisers language,followed by the assurance, “I knew that unlike the rest of us it would take her no time at all to say bowl like hole. smoothly, …show more content…
It is not only the universal language that suffers when it crosses spatial bounds but its rules that are constantly bent, twisted and altered with the expansion of geographical areas. The world language, often spread through a forced influence is used as a means of catharsis against itself. Poetry by African authors such as Sipho Sepamla and Karen Press shows that writing can never be devoid of the native influence. The prose of Ama Ata Aidoo’s, Our Sister Killjoy and A Small Place redefine the boundaries of genre. The cathartic nature of both these stories makes it harder for them to be genre-specific. The sprouting of several hybrid languages in the world with English as their basis has managed to redefine the English language with respect to writing styles and vocabulary. Having spread around the world through its colonial influence, the Queen’s English, what is the original language is scarcely known, giving way to the more popular vernaculars such as American English. The world language has been stripped of all conventions, having been ‘chutneyfied’ in the form of Hinglish or the more trending Franglais, a marriage of French and English. The original language has been peppered with
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.
Since it’s been a predominant topic of our discussion, let us talk about the infamous English language. We can be sure that it has painstakingly progressed throughout generations of reevaluation and modernization, and has thus become what it is today. It has gone in several directions to try and mesh with the various epochs of language, from the Shakespearean era to the common English slang we use now, we can all agree that English is a language that has been transcending and will continue to transcend into many
In the story “Mother Tongue,” by Amy Tan, Mrs. Tan talks about (in the book) her life and how she grew up with different Englishes was very hard and how it has affected her today. The setting of the book goes from being at lecture to the past of Amy Tan and her mother along with the different Englishes she had to come accustomed to. In “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, the author’s attitude towards the “different Englishes” she grew up with is fascinated. Amy Tan conveys this attitude through wanting to learn all different kinds of Englishes, her use of Englishes in her novel, and the acceptance she developed of her mother’s broken English.
Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue." 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology. 4th Edition. Ed. Samuel Cohen. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 417-23. Print.
• AW’s work is deeply rooted in oral tradition; in the passing on of stories from generation to generation in the language of the people. To AW the language had a great importance. She uses the “Slave language”, which by others is seen as “not correct language”, but this is because of the effect she wants the reader to understand.
Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. 2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 603-07.
Have you ever been to another country, state, or even city and realized how different your accent may be? Have you been asked to repeat a word or phrase that you may say differently? Sometimes we were asked for a good laugh, but that’s not always the case. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldúa and “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, both authors use personal narrative to demonstrate how their lives and identity are affected by their language and culture.
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.
In the essay “Mother Tongue” Amy Tan, the author, gives a different, a more upbeat outlook on the various forms of English that immigrants speak as they adapt to the American culture. Using simple language to develop her argument, she casually communicates to the audience rather than informing which helps the audience understand what is being presented at ease. Her mother plays an important role in her outlook of language, because she helps her realize that language not only allows one to be a part of a culture but create one’s identity in society. Amy Tan shares her real life stories about cultural racism and the struggle to survive in America as an immigrant without showing any emotions, which is a wonderful epiphany for the audience in realizing
Tan, Amy. "Mother Tongue." Across Cultures. Eds. Sheena Gillespie and Robert Singleton. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999. 26-31.
Language is like a blooming flower in adversity – they are the most rare and beautiful of them all as it struggles to express itself. It blooms and flourishes in strength, awe, and passion as the riches of thought is imbibed from the seed and into a finished beauty. For others, a non-native person speaking in a language that they are not familiar with sprouts out like a weed – the way its thorns can puncture sympathy and comprehensibility. Amy Tan, however, addresses the nature of talk as being unique under its own conditions. In Tan's “Mother Tongue”, she discusses how her mother's incoherent language is “broken” and “limited” as compared to other native English speakers. When focusing on Amy Tan, she grows noticeably embarrassed with her mother's lack of acuteness in the language, which then influences Tan to “prove her mastery over the English language.” However, she soon learns from herself and -- most importantly -- her mother that a language's purpose is to capture a person's “intent, passion, imagery, and rhythm of speech and nature of thought.” With such an enticing elegance...
Dawson, Ema, and Pierre Larrivee. “Attitudes to Language in Literary Sources: Beyond post-colonialism In Migration Literature.: English Studies 91.8(2010): 920-932. Literary Reference Center. Web. 30 Jan. 2014
Antoinette’s occupation of a hybrid position dismantles the stable binary of white/black, colonizer/colonized. Hybridity interrogates and deconstructs the western hegemonic assumption of stable subjectivity and meaning. Destabilising the notion of the self and the Other as envisioned by the western grand narratives hybridity proposes that the self is constructed by multiple ideologies and multiple discourses at the same time. Antoinette’s frustration and instability stem from her inability to belong to any particular community and culture. As a white creole, she oscillates between the European world of her ancestors and the Caribbean culture into which she is born. The fact that she is born in Jamaica as a white creole with a European background problematizes her identity belonging to neither of them fully thereby creating a hybrid status. Rhys through Antoinette’s ‘in-between space’ or a ‘Third Space’, as Homi K. Bhabha argues, takes a position that identity is ambivalent and crucially challenged in the hegemonic colonial setting.
—. Language: Readings in Language and Culture. 6th ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1998. Print.
Hepworth, M. D. (2012), Tutorial Notes, '69214339 TMA01', Unpublished Work. Leith, D. and Seargeant, P. (2012), 'A Colonial Language', in Seargeant, P. and Swann, J. ed. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a History, Diversity, Change (U214, English in the World), Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 113-117. 101.