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Mother Tongue

While English is spoken as a second language more than as a native language, non-native speakers are often stereotyped or assumed to be, unintelligible or incoherent. As shown in Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue", her mother often gets worse service by doctors, department stores, restaurants, stockbrokers, in comparison to Tan. During her teenage years, Tan often had to call places for her mother, as shown in her interaction with the stockbroker, who may have decided to try and cheat her mother out of her money simply because he may have believed that she wouldn't be able to get her complaints through to his boss (due to her English skill level). Even she (when she was younger) had a negative perception about what her mother had to say, due to her mother's "limited" English. The text provides a perspective of how people with observable 'non-nativeness' (in terms of speaking English), can have very different experiences in day to day life, compared to native speakers. Personally, I believe that there is also a slight racist or xenophobic factor to this as well, as the way one speaks English is one of the ways others can tell where a person is from. And once a person's origin is known, it provides all sorts of stereotypes and preconceptions about the person. For example, if I, as a Norwegian, have a Norwegian accent, then others, who know that accent, may form their own preconceptions about me and my personality despite not knowing who I am (e.g. "That guy must be rolling in the oil money!" or "I bet this guy really likes salmon"). Now while the stereotypes I listed for myself (I'm just using an example, I have no idea if those are actual stereotypes) may be pretty harmless, for other groups of people they can be quite harmful. Groups that are picked on a lot, may be 'outed' by their accent and/or the way they speak, for example. However, in the end, I believe that when people are treated differently because of their way of speaking English, it is more to do with their perceived 'lack of intelligence' (even though one's English skill level has nothing to do with intelligence, it will almost certainly affect other people's perception of your intelligence, if you are in a majority English speaking country/area), rather than overt racism. In my opinion (which I'm sure most of the class would agree), treating a non-native English speaker that is not as proficient at English as the native speakers; as being 'unintelligent' or something similar, is something that should be avoided, and done more to discourage, as it is not a good thing to have worse experience than others simply because you do not know a particular language. While this blog post focused on English, this message, I believe, can be applied to any other language.

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