Black English

Baldwin and Tan's view of language are quite similar. They both believe that language reflects back on their identity. Tan's view on language explains how people feel comfortable speaking their first language. This in my opinion is true, unless you move as a child to another country and make a living there. (My cousins first hand experience.) My cousin Lalo's, first language is Spanish. Although everyone around him speaks Spanish he completely forgot the language. Eventually he moved to Japan because his mother is in the A.F. and he learned Japanese. He no longer speaks Spanish, which is sad, but instead he now speaks Japanese. This reflects back on him because of the fact that he moved to make a new living in another country as a child. Baldwin's view is somewhat the same. People speak the language they feel comfortable with. But the departure is when Baldwin begins to speak about creating your own language. Baldwin believes that if black English was not invented then whites would have no language to speak. Baldwin made the statement that "Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound." This would mean that the mother tongue for all who are born in the U.S. speak the same language. Yet still people classify black English differently from just plain English. I disagree with Baldwin's statement. There is also European English (which to me is proper English) that is spoken in the U.S. This language in my opinion would have been the language spoken by Americans if Black's had never came to the U.S.