If Black English Isn't A Language...

In connection with Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” Baldwin makes a stance that language and the way a person sounds is connected with their identity and whom they are. If you are white you talk a certain way, if you are African American you talk a different way, if you live in Britain you talk differently than people in America. I think that Tan and Baldwin both focus on the same issue of language defining who a person is. It also allows people to make judgment calls on that person’s intelligence even though the person talking may be extremely intelligent. I think that the two do not entirely agree because Baldwin is focusing on an English language and how it is used by African Americans and whites in the United States while Tan is focusing on English being used by someone from another country and how that effects what people view them as. I think that because the two of them do not entirely agree it strengthens both of their arguments because they both have completely different focuses but still come together in the same debate about what language and who it is used causes people to pass judgment on others.

Mother Tongue

In most cases language does not reveal intelligence, it only reveals how well they may or may not know another language. In Amy Tan’s story about her mother it seems like the doctors made an assumption that just because her mother could not talk fluently in English that she was uneducated and did not understand what they (the doctors) were saying to her. Sometimes language does reveal intelligence because sometimes people who only speak English can sound very uneducated if they do not know how to use the language. It does not always mean that the person is unintelligent but it does show that the person does not know how to speak properly. I think that accents make people start to assume that the person with the accent is uneducated and does not know any different but I know that just because someone may have an accent does not mean that that person is uneducated. Tan’s mother is an example of someone who knows what is going on and is treated poorly because she has an accent, and that did not reveal anything about her as person or about her education. It does not reveal education in every case, only in the few were the person is really uneducated.

How To Tame A Wild Tongue

I only speak English so I only truly have one language mode. If you consider the way I talk to my peers and then the way I talk to my elders I suppose those could reveal my identity. If I was talking to someone of my age and I was told by someone older that my language or what I was saying was uneducated I suppose that would be an attack on my person, because I know that I am educated. The fact that I can change between talking to my peers and elders so quickly and change my language from being informal to extremely formal shows that I am educated enough to have a conversation with someone older then me. If someone my age were to attack the way I was speaking I would most likely just laugh it off because I don't think it would be an attack on my person.
The way I talk shows my identity because it is me talking in a normal way. It varies between who I am talking to but it does not have a drastic change. It shows my identity by me learning and growing as a person but yet being confident and vocal in my opinions.