Amy Tan My Mother Tongue Analysis

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Although Arabic is considered the official language of the United Arab Emirates, English is the most commonly used because it is simply the one language that allows all expatriates to communicate. Dubai and the UAE in general, have a huge number of foreigners coming from all over the world for various reasons. Indians and Filipinos are some of the most familiar faces in the country, and they have brought with them the gift of language. As a cause of this, Tagalog, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and many more languages have flooded the region and created multiple mediums of communication, and the only language that binds them all together is English. Therefore, everyone begins to speak with one another in English, and slowly the mother language fades, or worse; it becomes broken. As a result, people’s ability to communicate ideas or thoughts in Arabic becomes of poor quality and no matter how golden your ideas are, people will perceive you as a person of poor quality. As a local myself, after reading Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue, I found that couldn’t agree more with Tan’s idea of how a …show more content…

Amy Tan couldn’t have explained the elder native Arabic speaker’s worries any better. These elders fear that if their young cannot speak perfect Arabic, then they are going to be perceived as weak and “limited”; their image will be broken just like their speech and other people will think of their thoughts and ideas as of the same quality as their language. When it comes to English, it is the same case although it is a bit less severe. The reason for this is because English is known as the international language; everybody who wants to communicate with others knows how to speak it, and because everyone knows it, its value has decreased. I believe that because the English language is shared and used by everyone around the globe, it isn’t considered something special to know it, but it is a plus when you know Arabic or German for

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