Opinion Column

Mother Tongue

In Amy Tan’s writing, she specifies how her mother’s lack of communicating proper English left her discriminated in front of a society that expects proper English to be spoken. For this, she needed to help her mother for even official matters like conversing with the stockbroker and translating some things as well. This certain scenario reminded me of a personal experience with my own mom. Last year, during the 3 way conferences, I had to translate most of what my teachers were saying to her as she couldn’t really comprehend different accents. Since she was used to just communicating in English taught back in India, she only understood English spoken in a South- Indian accent. Also for the fact that she wasn’t exposed to a wider range of international English speakers didn’t make her situation better. Therefore, I needed to reassure her of whatever she heard from my teacher by translating it back into my mother tongue, Malayalam. She could understand most of the conversation but she wouldn’t speak a word back as she wasn’t confident with her English. If anything important came and she needed to e-mail someone, she would ask me to type up whatever she wants to convey a message as she’s afraid to express her type of English consisting grammar mistakes and uncommon accent. As a daughter, I try to help increase her confidence as I encourage her to speak in English at home so that I can correct her wherever possible in grammar and even certain pronunciations. She also puts in her own effort in order to improve her speech and be more confident wherever she goes. Similar to Amy Tan, I believe that my mother’s verbalization is comprehensible even with her grammar problems. She can be understood but just not respected as much as a person who can speak English fluently. The only fault I find is that she isn’t confident when she uses English and therefore, isn’t comfortable in using it more often in front of English speakers in contrast to Tan’s mother where she does yell at the stockbroker’s boss in her broken English. Although my mother may be considered as a broken English speaker in the eyes of a fluent speaker, to all my relatives back in our town in India, she would be praised as the best English speaking woman. This is because, the education she received back in the 1970s and 80s were considered the best of schooling in a NIC country like India. Even now, her skills are valued in the eyes of the natives in our growing town supporting the fact that, she is still skilled and powerful in whatever knowledge she possesses but wasn’t in a situation to improve it. In conclusion, I believe that although people may be receiving incomplete or basic knowledge on the English language, it is because of their situation and time frame. If given the chance to improve on it, they would, as long as the society accepts their current flaws and help enhance their present capabilities without discrimination..

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 1, 2017 at 11:13 PM

    Try to space out the text more cause I constantly found myself getting lost in the block of text, Other then that good job. Do you ever get annoyed by having to translate for your mom? As for the format of your opinion blog I think maybe you should add more of your opinion rather than your story as most of the blog was about yourself and you just related it back to yourself. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownOctober 8, 2017 at 9:05 AM

    I feel the same with Vaneeza, just give more spaces between text! And I love the way you implied your own example into your blog! :))) I also did similar thing, come and read mine!! XP

    ReplyDelete

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