Blog Post #4: Mother Tongue

23/09/2016

Welcome back to my blog, now this blog post is going to be a little different as you will experience my enthusiastic opinions for the first time. This will be more of an opinionated post but in my case could turn into a rant, if this does happen I will try to organise this rant as best as I can. "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan discusses her and her family have faced with language and English, the discussion presents the reader with a number of issues they encountered and we still encounter in society. A specific issue I want to focus on within the text is certain stereotypes thought of non-native speakers of the language English. There are a number of troubles mentioned in her text however, this is one I feel extremely passionate about and will continue to fight against. More specifically, I want to discuss the stigma present against someone who may not be able to communicate in English very well. This stigma arises in many situations and tends to allow people to build an opinion on one's intelligence based on their speech.

If someone were to speak the English with a lack of skill or speak "broken" English, suddenly people gain a certain perspective of the person. This perspective automatically puts them in a group of less intelligence, it is someone we unconsciously do. In psychology, we study how humans categorise members of society unconsciously because it allows us to identify who we should communicate with and who we shouldn't. It is human nature and comes down to the survival of the fittest, these actions or thought we are unaware of allow us to hopefully live and grow the life best for us. However, to automatically categorise someone in a separate intellectual social group based on how well they speak your language is cruel and unfair.

Everyone has the ability to be incredibly smart but just because they can't convey this in your language does not make them any less smart. Let's use Tan's mother as an example, her mother could be a skilled linguist with an extremely high education in Chinese but to transfer this mindset to English is another thing. The people at the hospital thought of her as a low priority due to her lack of English, they assumed that she was not as important as someone they could easily communicate with. This prioritising was not due to our ego centrical opinion of the English language, well it could be for some but in most cases, it is because we are judging the fact that they can't properly communicate.

We know how important language and communication is, so when confronted with someone who cannot communicate with us we assume they are less educated. When this is not the case, we forget about language and forget that not everyone knows how to communicate in our language. The world may be more open minded and international in our modern period but this is still present. In some cases, it's not our fault if we unconsciously judge someone for this because it is our raw barbaric mind judging their lack of ability to communicate. In saying this, it is our job to catch this of ourselves constantly reminding ourselves that everyone has a different background and a different way of communication. So I hope you all take something from this and maybe be try to help someone who can't communicate very well instead of pushing them away.