This particular post shall act as a medium of reflection on the short article "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan. In the article "Mother Tongue," the reader is introduced to the incessant conflicts Tan's Chinese mother is victim to due to her inability to eloquently converse in English. While Tan centralizes her article on the overarching mandated significance of the English language and vividly illustrates the horrid experiences her mother had to deal with as a non-native English speaker, what raises my concerns on the contrary is the pedestal that the English language has been hoisted on in today's world. I mean, it is for certain that the English language acts as a universal binding force between people of different ethnicities, however, does this interactional language possess the power to debilitate the bond prevalent in pre-existing languages of different communities? Maybe so.
To clarify where I am heading to with this post, let's take into consideration an example personal to me. Growing up, I went to elementary and middle school in the city of Mumbai in India. As mentioned in my preceding blog post, the national language of India is Hindi. One would hence expect that this is the most commonly spoken language in schools and amongst peers. However, that is completely false. In fact, the school I went to did not permit students to converse in Hindi unless it was during a Hindi lesson. The dominant language thus was English. Did I establish the fact that this was an Indian school and not an International school? Well that is how it was in majority of the schools. The emphasis laid on English strangely superseded that of on the actual national language of the country.
This mentality of English being absolutely critical for existence in this world has infested certain communities so greatly that the tribal languages are being comparatively less prioritized. Correspondingly, according to linguistsociety, there were roughly 6800 distinct languages being spoken globally in 1996 (1). Nonetheless, linguists have expressed their grave concern regarding the rapid decline of this number as more and more languages are on the verge of extinction. Some linguists have even gone as far as hypothesizing the loss of 40% of the remnant languages by the end of this century! Can there come a point where it all boils down to just 10 languages? Can you begin to fathom a world where perhaps English is the only spoken language? A world where the languages our communities once identified with crumble irreparably?
It may be true that this occurence won't unfold in the span of our lives. But the mere proposition is frightening.
Swinging back to the article itself, Tan makes a valid point about the adversities her mother encounters, however Tan herself does not bring up any points in accordance to her connection with Mandarin/Cantonese. She mentions how she speaks to her mother in "fractured" English. However, the reader is left in a cloud of ambiguity in terms of whether Tan herself spoke Mandarin/Cantonese?
I personally believe that it is so crucial to be able to speak your own language. This particular notion holds even more gravity if one is not residing in their home country as they are already in a sense detached from their culture. Thus, perhaps in the form of metaphorical compensation one must strive to learn their mother tongue. Regardless of where an individual is from, I strongly believe that one should take great pride in their roots and not try to escape them in any way.
This post turned out to be way more serious than I intended for it to be. Hence, as a feeble attempt to end on a light note~
What do you think about the supremacy of the English language on a global scale?
Again, if you actually made it to the end of this, congratulations!
Works cited
1. By Some Estimates, 80% of the World's Languages May Vanish within the next Century. "What Is an Endangered Language?" Linguisticsociety,org. Linguistic Society of America, n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2016.
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