Comments on Sandra G. Kouritzin's "A Mother's Tongue". A Reader Reacts

Abstract

* I read A Mother's Tongue (Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2000) with great interest but with mixed feelings. As I read it, I kept questioning Sandra Kouritzin's rationale for not allowing her children to experience their mother's tongue, English, but instead restricting them to her husband's heritage language, Japanese. Although I respect Kouritzin's and her husband's commitment and efforts to maintain one of their heritage languages in the family, I question the validity of their family language planning if indeed Kouritzin's experience of using Japanese with her children is filled with negative sentiments such as inadequacy, incompetence, and guilt, as her article describes. In fact, I found her article rather depressing and disturbing. Instead of celebrating bilingualism at home, namely, using both English and Japanese, Kouritzin seems to create a rather artificial linguistic and social environment for her family by depriving herself and her children of sharing the linguistic and cultural heritage that she truly represents. In addition, Kouritzin's limited Japanese proficiency, as she describes it, may have a detrimental effect on her children in terms of the limited range of language experiences that she could offer (Genesee, 1987) in the long term. Furthermore, I question Kouritzin's optimism about her children's continued interest in Japanese even after they start school, where they will be exposed to a language other than Japanese. Studies by social psychologists such as Homans (1961, cited in Beebe, 1988) seem to indicate that children tend to converge toward their peers' norms in order to belong by diverging from their teachers' or parents' language. While her children are small, they have no choice but go along with the family language planning that Kouritzin and her husband have chosen, but eventually they will choose the language that they want to identify with. Hence, the efforts and energy that Kouritzin and her husband are putting into maintaining a heritage language may end up a Pyrrhic victory, or, in the worst-case scenario, their children may resent the language imposed on them by their parents. My reaction to Kouritzin's article is based on my own experience as a mother of an 8-year-old daughter and as a language professional. As in