Analysis of "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan: DRAFT

Mother Tongue is about the authors struggles with her linguistic identity, her mothers "fractured" or "broken" variation of english and the relationship with her mother. At the beginning of the piece we are told about the different types of english she would speak with her mother and with everyone else; we are then told how english wasn't Amy's strongest subject and later on we are told about the difficulties her mother experienced because of the way she spoke english and the prejudice she faced.

In the text Tan uses a variety of stylistic devices to express herself, tans use of parallel structures is used frequently throughout the piece, for example she starts the first paragraph with the phrase "i am not a scholar of english" and the second with "i am a writer"; this contrast implies to the audience that you don't have to know everything about english to be a writer. She also uses personification in the second paragraph when she says " language is the tool of my trade". This might suggest that the use of language through writing is the way she expresses herself or gets her point across. She then goes onto saying " And i use them all- all the Englishes i grew up with" and in the next paragraph she says "Recently, i was made keenly aware of the different Englishes i do use." She uses repetition in this instance to emphasize how, in her opinion, there is no right way or one way of speaking english there are different variations, in this instance the English with her mother is very different from how she speaks english to her teachers or classmates, this can refer back to the title of the text "mother tongue". Mother tongue is usually reffered to the first language a person is taught, however i think Tans use of the word mother tongue is much more intimate in a sense that she feels that her english or her mother tongue is unique to her, and that the variation of english she speaks to her mother is her mother tongue. Moreover she also uses repition when she uses