A fact would not be interesting to people who feel humiliated because of their accent while communicating in English. In Mother Tongue by Amy Tan, she argues that there is no specific way of speaking English as it exists in multiple varieties. This position is evident given that the English spoken by immigrants and American families varies greatly as their respective backgrounds influence how they communicate. For immigrant families, communicating in public is difficult due to their “broken English.” As a result they are mistreated. In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan reveals the many challenges immigrant families face in the eyes of a demanding audience to express why it is no one's duty to judge others based on their communication skills. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The inability to communicate in fluent English is sometimes unfairly characterized as an inability. When people fail to express their thoughts in familiar English, those who hear them fail to approach them with the seriousness required. In some cases, it is seen as some form of disability and the person is humiliated. Along with her mother, Tan was the recipient of such treatment. She notes with concern that “when I was little, my mother's 'limited' English limited my perception of her.” Amy also adopted the mentality of belittling people whose English wasn't perfect. Like the public around her and her mother, she had made life more difficult for people who were unable to use fluent English. The scope of the challenges that immigrant families have faced throughout history has been extended to their race. For Tan and her mother, the fear was that they would be treated like outsiders and that no one would be interested in seeing beyond their Chinese origin. These emotions are also echoed in The Blackness of “Broken English” when Rudolf Gaudio lamented the severity of discrimination. For English-speaking Americans, the use of pseudo-Spanish words like Exactamndo is justified as a funnier way of saying exactly. Furthermore, they would use African American English expressions like “We Be Growing” and “Da Crib” and make an excuse for the same. However, when others use the same method to communicate, English-speaking Americans do not tolerate them. In doing so, Gaudio points out that this has been used to racialize “practices of linguistic appropriation.” The discrimination of people based on their accent is such that immigrant families have difficulty communicating in public space. For immigrant families, discriminatory practices have even forced them to adopt unpopular tactics such as falsifying their identity. Because of the embarrassment associated with speaking broken English, immigrants must resort to other tactics to create false identities to cover their perceived imperfection. Amy believes her mother has made peace with her limited English. However, to be taken seriously, she had to ask Amy to pretend to be her so that communication between her and other English-speaking people would be taken seriously. She remembers calling people on the phone in her mother's place and doing what her mother would normally do. When dealing with her mother's stockbroker, for example, she recalls having to "pick up the phone and say in a teenage voice that wasn't very convincing: 'This is Mrs Tan.' Amy's mother had to recreate a different personality under her daughter's disguise to protect herself from public judgment. The English-speaking community has tried to belittle anddegrade anyone who does not speak English fluently, and this has prompted the latter to adopt such tactics. The English language has become a point of contention across the world in an undesirable way. Each group continues to judge the other based on their English speaking abilities, but English should only be a means of communication and a cultural symbol rather than a measure of intelligence. In Ireland, the debate over who is better than the other based on their ability to speak English has been a perennial issue between Chomskyans and Whorfians. The two camps are always arguing over which expression in English is the standard determination of what being Irish should entail. This argument has often resulted in “a war of words” in an attempt to determine “whether language determines thought and culture, and whether English can be a suitable medium for expressing 'Irish'. From the example above, it is clear that the issue of speaking English has been blown out of proportion to include a reflection of the authenticity of a person from a particular group. The Irish scenario has now pitted two groups at opposite ends of this debate. Amy Tan's narrative expresses a more subtle version of discriminatory practices. However, it is from such subtle disagreements and stereotypes that considerable disagreements arise. Even people who do not use English as their first language are looked down upon regardless of their achievements in other areas of life. Amy Tan has witnessed the highly discriminatory behavior that persists in the school system regardless of her performance in other subjects. She is candid enough to admit that her grades in English were not as impressive as those she posted in others such as math and science. However, she would still have managed to get a B or B minus, which was impressive given that she would have been in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile. In any case, Tan performed well in school and this would have earned her more respect. Because she was an immigrant, her English grades were perceived as poor, but her efforts would not be considered adequate enough to “ignore the view that my true abilities lay in math and science.” This argument shows that for immigrants, English is used as the only measure of their intelligence and all other grades have been discredited. This school of thought promotes unfair comparison and competition between English language learners and immigrant learners. Immigrants' efforts in learning the English language are not only discredited in schools but also in other public spaces. Tan lamented that immigrants' accents significantly limit their confidence in public speaking. It would be perceived that any effort to speak fluent English would therefore be appreciated by English-speaking people. However, this was not always the case. In fact, any attempt to speak English was rejected because their words were not intelligible. Even after years of friendship, Tan noticed that he had friends who didn't necessarily understand each other when he tried to speak in English. When looking for their answers, some of them said they only understood 80 or 90 percent of what she said, others had quite high standards and told her that "they don't understand anything, as if she were speaking pure Chinese." . This was a brutal assessment of Tan's mother's English as she had put a lot of effort into her communication skills. He had read the Forbes report, listened to Wall Street weekly, and had daily conversations with his stockbroker. To his friends, these efforts were not appreciated simply because he was unable to speak fluently. Please note: this is just an example.., 35(3), 99-119.