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.
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