A Personal Dialect In Amy Tan's Essay 'Mother Tongue'

A Personal Dialect In Amy Tan’s essay, “Mother Tongue,” Tan expresses that she uses different versions of the English language depending on the type of relationship she shares with particular individuals. While Tan gave a speech to a group of people, she noticed a difference in her register of speech when she spoke to a group of people versus when she spoke to her mother. She noticed her use of “carefully wrought grammatical phrases” and “the forms of standard English that I had learned in school through books,” the forms of English she “did not use” with her mother. Tan continued by explaining that it was not until recently that she began to see that she speaks to members of her family very differently from the way she speaks to people outside