Mother Tongue: Response Essay

How do the languages that one speaks at home influence social identity?

In Tan’s article ‘Mother Tongue’, she expresses her recognition and concern over the difference in social attitudes towards her mother’s use of English and American society’s standard English. By introducing her recent realization of her use of standard English in public but not at home, and giving detailed examples of how she speaks with her mother in English and how her mother speaks in English, she reiterates her understanding of her mother’s English; in other words her “mother tongue”. In doing so, she admits to struggling with her definitions of her mother’s English such as defining her mother’s English as “limited”, hence leading her to perceive her mother as intellectually less capable. This is supported by Tan’s examples of how her mother relied on her (even when she was a child) to get about in American society due to Tan’s use of “proper standard English”. Furthermore, Tan’s opinion that due to the differences in language use between her home and the rest of American society had impacts on how she was brought up and ultimately, her social identity. By explaining Tan’s situation through the sociolinguistic lens and linking it to Singapore’s sociolinguistic landscape, I hope to unearth and discover how languages are spoken at home influence one’s social identity.

As social beings, we are born into environments where interaction with other people is necessary and hence inescapable. This then leads to the construction of our social histories, basically our experiences of who we interact with as time passes, which are defined by our belonging (or “membership”) in social groups given to us the moment we are born: gender, social class, religion, and race. (Hall, 2002) According to American linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs, social identity can be defined as an individual’s participation, positions, relationships, reputation, and other social dimensions, which are associated with his sense of self. (Ochs, 1993) Language then is a tool for humans to communicate, belong to, and demarcate our social groups. That is to say, our various social identities are not simply labeled that we come with filled with our own intentions but influenced and shaped by the linguistic resources we use in our activities. Rather, these labels embody particular histories that have been developed over time by other group members enacting similar roles using language. (Hall, 2002) Termed as ‘habitus’ by social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, the historically grounded, socially constituted knowledge, skills, beliefs, and attitudes that comprise our various social identities predispose us to act, think and feel in particular ways and to perceive the involvement of others in certain ways. (Hall, 2002) Linking to Speech Act Theory, which is an utterance defined in terms of a speaker's intention and the effect it has on a listener in order to carry out actions (Nordquist, 2019), language is a resource we manipulate according to the social consensus we have accepted in certain situations, conforming us to identities which we ascribe to in our social groups. In other words, we create our social interactions based on the perceptions and evaluations we have come to associate with both our ascribed and appropriated social identities and those of our interlocutors, and we use them to rationalize one another’s involvement in our encounters. (Herk, 2012) Hence, with the aid of language use, when interacting with one another in social events, we perceive ourselves and others in the manner in which we have been socialized.

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This then results in language beliefs and myths that come with the birth of societies that are hierarchical in nature. Such beliefs and myths are used as “evidence” to support the linguistic prejudices of those in power and reinforce the higher status of the standard and colonial languages. For instance, some languages are believed to be unable to express complex ideas or have tiny vocabularies. One prominent example is the idea of a standard language, which suggests that it is an accent-less, more objective variety of the language when it is just the variety spoken by those in power. As a result, standard language ideologies attribute non-standard language use to deliberate non-conformity. (Herk, 2012) Furthermore, what the standard language ideology does is impose a massively steeper burden on speakers of some varieties than on others. When people say that speakers of a non-standard variety “could change if they wanted to,” they are in effect saying, “even though it would require a massive effort, erasure of their identity, and rejection of their home language and community norms, and even then it would still not be completely successful.” (Herk, 2012) With all these in mind, we can come to the conclusion that from a sociolinguistic perspective, language as a tool to determine in-groups and out-groups in a society shapes our perceptions of one another, thereby influencing our social identities.

When applying these sociolinguistic theories, they are able to provide some insights into the situation Tan is in. This is highlighted by Tan’s essay, “Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as 'broken' or 'fractured' English...” (Tan A., 1990) As her mother’s English is perceived as the non-standard variety due to its difference from Standard American English, it led to Tan being “ashamed of her [mother’s] English and believ[ing] that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say”, buying into this unexamined form of linguistic class prejudice. Similarly, I cannot help but wonder about how Singlish is perceived by both locals and foreigners when linking it to my sociolinguistic situation back home. There are conflicting attitudes towards its usage whereby some claim it is a part of national identity, while those against it are inclined to position it as “bad English”. Therein lies the similarity to Tan’s situation since perceiving Singlish as the non-standard variety only undermines its status in society by comparing it to the much-lauded Standard English. Furthermore, since Singlish is prevalent in use, especially in Singaporean homes, the Standard English ideology will only erase parts of the Singaporean identity and the ‘rejection of home language and community norms. The push for English first emerged during the Speak Good English campaigns of the early 2000s which tried to stamp out Singlish, due to local government language planning and policies that deemed English as the standard variety. The government’s move reflected a large portion of the Singaporean public still remaining unconvinced and continuing to view Singlish as nothing more than ‘bad’ or ‘broken’ English. The ongoing campaign had been explicitly demonizing Singlish as an impediment to economic growth and prosperity, with former prime minister Goh Chok Tong arguing that the foreign world’s inability to understand Singlish. Therefore, heated debates have been ongoing between Singaporeans stressing international intelligibility in the usage of Singlish, and those that argue for the preservation of Singlish on the grounds of the variety expressing Singaporean identity.

This has subsequently affected the perceptions towards speakers of Singlish and English, and hence the social identities of those in Singapore society. Over time, it has become a social marker – which refers to any feature of a person’s speech seen as reflecting their status in society. (Wong, 2015) In Singapore, someone who can effectively switch between the two- English and Singlish- is perceived to be more educated and of a higher social status than someone who can only speak Singlish. Meanwhile, someone who can only speak English, and not Singlish, meanwhile, may be perceived as slightly posh, or worse - not a real Singaporean. (E. Leimgruber, 2009) In relation to Tan’s article, her mother’s English is perceived by American society as a non-standard variety due to the difference in accents, pronunciation, and syntax, hence leading to negative attitudes due to the prestige associated with standard English. Bringing back to Bourdieu’s habitus, “the internalization of the norms and values [are] implied by the prevailing discourses within the social order” (Hall, 2002), which is further shaped by the varieties of language we speak, determining our perceptions of one another and therefore our social identities.

In another article written by Singaporean author Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, she raised another important argument about the power of language in influencing social identities. With Singlish playing a similar role in my society, Amy Tan’s personal experience with her mother’s variety of language divides and marginalizes herself and her mother from the rest of American society, while creating an intimacy between her and her mother. While Singlish divides, it also unites Singaporean society through the mixture of a shared language influenced by a shared culture and a shared community. Titled ‘The Singlish Language Reflects the Power of my People’, Tan draws a compelling case of Singlish reflecting the Singapore spirit. This is rightly pointed out in her rhetorical question “Doesn’t Singlish as an informal dialect rather directly reflect who we are as a people?” (Tan, 2016) In other words, I daresay that Singlish is a part of Singapore's national identity, despite the government’s opposing stance and early linguists’ reference to it as “a product of imperfect learning and spoken only by the uneducated and uncouth”. Cheryl Tan further backs up her arguments with convincing examples that as a born and bred Singaporean, I wholly agree. For instance, “catch no ball” is a Singlish phrase from the literal English translation Hokkien, and “Gostan!” is a Malay slang derived from the English nautical term, “go astern.” (Tan, 2016) As a contact variety, which refers to a language that has been influenced by words used by several ethnic groups such as Malays, Chinese, and Indians, Singlish is an exact reflection of the nation’s local distinctiveness of racial harmony, which is uniquely Singapore. Cheryl Tan’s article is an expression of pride in the local variety called Singlish, often criticized by policy-makers as not matching the exogenous standards but proudly claimed by many Singaporeans as part of their social, if not national, identities. (E. Leimgruber, 2009)

References

1. E.Leimgruber, J. R. (2009). Modeling Variation in Singapore English. Oxford, Cambridge: -.
2. FRANCESCO CAVALLARO, B. C. (2014). Singapore Colloquial English: Issues of prestige and identity. In B. C. FRANCESCO CAVALLARO, World Englishes (pp. 378- 397). Singapore: Wiley & Sons.
3. Hall, J. K. (2002). Teaching and Researching: Language and Culture. United States of America: Longman.
4. Herk, G. V. (2012). What is Sociolinguistics? Canada: John Wiley & Sons.
5. Nordquist, R. (2019). Speech Acts in Linguistics. ThoughtCo., -.
6. Ochs, E. (1993). Constructing Social Identity: A Language Socialization Perspective. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 287- 306.
7. Tan, A. (1990). Mother Tongue. The Threepenny Review, -.
8. Tan, C. L.-l. (2016). The Singlish Language Reflects the Power of My People. TIME Magazine, -.
9. Wong, T. (2015). The rise of Singlish. BBC News, -.
10. Ying, T. Y. (2019). Commentary: Singlish is not English. That’s not a bad thing. Channel News Asia Commentary