Amy Tan Mother's Tongue Summary

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In the essay “Mother’s Tongue” by Amy Tan, Tan believes we all speak in different tongues, languages, and based on our limitations in english, effects the way we are judged in society. Born in a Chinese culture, Tan has grown up adapting and learning how to speak in different languages. She begins to recognize experiences in her life that exposes the different types of tongue, or as she puts it “englishes”, that she herself uses. She opens the idea by first realizes her english she uses publicly when her mother attends one of her lectures. She puts her public english as “filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard
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