Anita Khoshkhelghat

Gaby AD
Riley Redman
Shannelle Brown
Nancy Morales
Kevin Su
Amy Tan Mother Tongue
Question One:
In paragraph 2, Tan mentions all the Englishes she grew up with. What were those Englishes?
What is odd about the term?
Nancy: Tan is American but her parents were Chinese therefore she knew more than one way of
speaking English. She was aware of was her mothers which was a flawed english. Her mother
wasnt very fluent with the language therefore she spoke the best she could. The other English she
was aware of was the proper way she was taught in school. The oddity about the term " all the
Englishes" is that technically there is only one English. Tan says that her mother's English is a
flawed or brown English . So when she refers to " all the Englishes" she means the English she
speaks with her mother and the English she speaks in school or with others .
Anita: I think she implies to the different sort of English. One is English that relates to family talk,
language of intimacy, conversational language, and other is the English that filled with carefully
wrought grammatical phrases, nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the
forms of standard English that she had learned in school and and through books, the forms of
English that she didn't use at home.
Gaby: Tan as a Chinese-American she defines herself someone who has always loved language
and fascinated by language in daily life and the Englishes that she wrote about,were all kind of
Englishes that she in her daily life speaks, the englishes of all the people from different countries
speak.
Riley: I think Tan says that there are more than one Englishs because of the many ways English
can be presented depending on different dialects and cultures. A good example is something like
spanglish where English and Spanish are mixed together due to the way some Spanish speaking
families communicate at home. The term is odd because there is only one known English in the
world. It is an official language and there is no such thing as a plural English.
Shannelle: I agree with all of them, because she refer to different styles of english in which she
communicates. Her mother isnt fluent with the language therefore the way her mother speaks is the
way she address her mother which is a simple form of English.