Part 2

Undeniably, language has a major influence on people’s life. In “Mother Tougue”, according to several anecdotes concerning Amy Tan’s mother, Amy vividly explains this to the audience. Indeed, difference of using language between my parent and me do exist.

The main distinction of language between my parent and me is the tone. They usually speak in a formal way no matter who the audience is. Even when my mother asks me to help her to change the air conditioner, she says that sentence in a commanding tone. By contrast, the choices of what kind of words and sentences should be used to express my point of view are always optional, formal or informal.

I suppose one reason of this difference of speaking tone is derived from dissimilar tendency of the times. When my parents were the same age as I am, what the education they received was communism propaganda which included a variety of slogans like “abide by the great leader Mao” or “ socialism is the only way for China to become thriving and prosperous”. Those sentences, in my eyes, are nonsense and inane, but in my parents’ opinion in that time, those were the truth. However, as china’s policy of opening to the outside world, different opinions coming from outside affect the youth generation of China, the tone that they uses becomes varied. They do not speak Chinese formally as their parents do. For example, I use Arab numbers to replace some Chinese character in my sentence sometimes, because they have similar pronunciations, and are easily to speak out.

Moreover, even some meanings of ancient Chinese characters have been changed artificially. Like character “囧”, in ancient Chinese it means bright, however, as the shape of this character is like a man’s face with emotional feeling, this character has been defined a new meaning, embarrassing. This character is derived from Internet, and of course, cannot be used in formal meetings. When there is an important speech that I need to give, words I choose to use become complicated. The main feature to distinguish whether I’m using a formal language is to feel whether it is hard to comprehend. I personally think formal speech is unbearable and interminable, and make audience feel there is a barrel for further communication between them and the speaker. Hence, it is understandable that a formal speech I give would need me type hundreds of words, and if the same meaning of that speech is used in informal speech, the data of word account would dramatically decrease.
Overall, many kind of tone of languages I encounter in my daily life, using internet language on-line, informal speaking with my friend, formal one toward my parents.
These are all about tones. Also, speaking English occurs my English classes, Mandarin is used in the rest of subjects and formal situation, and I also usually speak Sichuan accent, the local accent. In my opinion, the reason why there are so many kind of languages and tones is because of popularity, different situation and, environment you live in.