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Tan uses this plural form of “English” to indicate that there are multiple different forms of English. For instance, she grew up speaking a non-standard kind of English because this is what her mother speaks. This helps her make the point that it’s possible to be linguistically competent without speaking standardized English—a point that ultimately argues for the idea that language is flexible.
Englishes Quotes in Mother Tongue
The Mother Tongue quotes below are all either spoken by Englishes or refer to Englishes. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Mother Tongue
Quotes
It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.
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But to me, my mother’s English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It’s my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.
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I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly, her thoughts were imperfect.
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Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me.
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I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down”; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure.
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I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
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Englishes Term Timeline in Mother Tongue
The timeline below shows where the term Englishes appears in Mother Tongue. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Mother Tongue
...how she personally uses them in her life and writing. Tan claims to use “different Englishes” and recalls experiences in her past to show how she uses language in her life.
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Now, Tan imagines a reader while she writes, one who will understand the many “Englishes” she grew up with. Imagining her mother, Tan writes for an audience of mothers and...
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