Tongue

language”, so to speak, creating new definitions because they were labeled as the defined, is still seen today in the form of the African American Vernacular English dialect (AAVE) – otherwise known as Ebonics. Revisiting Gloria Anzaldua’s To Tame a Wild Tongue, we find that her experience with “linguistic shaming” is something also encountered by African Americans as AAVE is often looked down-upon as “ignorant speech” due to its deviation from the “standard” American dialect. As a result,…

I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican and the Anglo” (p62 How to Tame a Wild Tongue Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa). Anzaldua was exposed to another language, English, and she feels like her culture was stolen. She had to be careful about what she was saying, and also be careful with what language she was using. Her teacher told her…

different languages to communicate with people of their same ethnicity and culture. Language us a dynamic tool that helps people intermingle with others. English is the primary language in the United States of America. Amy Tan the author of “Mother Tongue” talks about how dominant the English language is. In her writings Tan explains that in the early phases of her life, English was a challenging language for her and her mother to understand. As an Asian-American, Tan was stereotyped to…

When the anthology The Gift of Tongues was published, a majority of the writers were not a popular fan of the anthology due to the fact the majority of the people felt that poems should not be read out of context. At first I agreed with the critics during that time period considering the fact that every poem I read, I felt I was in a time machine heading off to different time periods. As I continue reading the poems anthologized by Sam Hamill, I traced this anthology in the epithetical point of…

After reading Amy Tan’s, “Mother Tongue” and Paule Marshall’s, “From the Poets in the Kitchen” I pondered and formed several opinions and reactions about these two pieces of literature. Both stories compare and contrast in many ways. In Marshall’s story, she explains how listening to her mother and her friend’s in the kitchen throughout her years as a child had blossomed her as a writer and a person. Marshall reveals instances of how this occurred and what effects it had on her mother, her…

Amy Tan is a bestselling author born in 1952. She has written several novels focused on mother-daughter relationships. In Mother Tongue, Tan analyzes the different “Englishes” she uses in everyday life and why some are considered better than others. Tan’s mother, a Chinese immigrant, speaks in what some call a “broken” form of English (543). She claims her mother is treated unfairly because of her fractured language. Because Tan grew up speaking the English of her mother, she could understand…

Louise Pratt introduces the term “auto-ethnography” to define a piece of writing that people believe describes themselves based off the representation others have made of them. With this in mind, we can read Gloria Anzaldua’s text, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” as an example of an autoethnographic text. In addition to being an auto-ethnography, this text gives many examples of a process called transculturation. This is a process where members of marginal groups select and invent based off…

The short essay of “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan emphasizes the different Englishes she uses to communicate with her family and at her professional environment; therefore she explains the differences between non-Standard English and Standard English. Tan views non-standard English as her mother tongue language because her family can communicate better with her. She views Standard English as the formal way to communicate with professional people in a daily basis. English is the formal language in…

their own language is lost, along with their culture and their true identity. In Gloria Anzaldua, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, she explains how the Anglo attacks her language and violates the First Amendment, which made way for a new language to form along with a new identity. In the beginning she gives a scene where she is at the dentist and they are trying to “tame her wild tongue” and explains how speaking Spanish at recess could get her “three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler”…

In Luzzi's "speaking to my father in a dead dialect" and Anzaldua's "how to tame a wild tongue", they give us insight on how they faced challenges with their own language, one was becoming forgotten by time while the other was being forced to break apart, however similar the context might be, their stories, experiences and closures highlight the differences in their writings. Story: -Luzzi describes how their old dialect was slowly being forgotten with the passage of time as they moved…