white anglo saxon protestant, with a cleft tongue

Kiyooka, "We Asian North Americanos: An unhistorical 'take' on growing up yellow in a white world".

creatively speaking:

The half-breed tongue: everything laced with another syntax. Until it is never just one or two languages being spoken but some strange number be/tween one & two. A hyphenation, dependent on context to lean toward one or the other way, linguistically speaking. Most often in canadian english, my fathertongue, though also in japanese english, which is my mothertongue, which is to say that it is english words with japanese meaning. It was very strange when I first realized I was not speaking english sometimes. It seemed english to me, or maybe not classified/categorized in any certain method, just 'language' - spoken thought conveying intention. But there were mistranslations and misunderstandings and so I labelled certain of my sayings as 'non-english, do not say outside of home' and so this remains, though sometimes I forget myself and state them, and see that familiar look of confusion on an other's face.

My japanese, scant tho it is, is not the japanese of a grown woman but rather the baby-speak that is given to children, intentionally cute and dimunitive. My mother tells me I speak with an accent, and I think she likes the chance to be saying that to me, to have 'accent' apply to someone other than herself. The other thing I never noticed until in public with confused other faces: my mother's accent, which supposedly is difficult to understand tho as a child it seemed the normal way of speech and syntax. Apparently not. Something to unlearn. Which is a strange reversal, me unlearning the things my mother so diligently taught, and further, later, her saying to me: "What does this mean? How do you say this?" So that I become her educator in a language that is/not my own. She so obviously outside of its linguistic structure, and asking me to be a bridge inside - this, too, requires a foot on both sides, and increasingly the footing is insecure.

My fathertongue taught by my father is phonetically correct. There is no accent there. There is no difference written into sound, and this is the mimicry I learn and go on to teach to my mothertongue. Until my tongue is both and neither, the half-breed of two languages, the bastard hybrid. Cleft? hardly. Quite unified, if confused. A linguistics of one.