English not your native tongue?

For a long time English has used the word "tongue" (pronounced tung) to stand for language. Before the days of widespread literacy, this always meant the spoken language. Using the word tongue to stand for a whole language is not so surprising when you think about it. In English, if not all languages, our tongues play a vital role in shaping sounds. Language joins various sounds together to represent things, ideas or actions, for example. From another perspective, spoken language is simply an audible code to communicate.

To create sounds correctly, our tongues must be in constant motion. Of course, if you "wag your tongue" (like a dog wags its tail), you will be called a gossip. If someone uses crude or obscene language, they will be told, "Watch your tongue!" Without a mirror, watching your own tongue is pretty hard unless your tongue is very long. Try it!

While speaking English correctly, our tongues fly all over our mouths. Those born or growing up in the U.S. learn to move their tongues correctly as very young children. People born outside the U.S. learn English in schools which usually do not emphasize pronunciation. Since they do not learn as children, and do not study it in school, no wonder most adults have serious doubts about how they speak. Even if your eyes, ears, and brain all are expert in English, your tongue still needs to learn the complex dance necessary to speak fluently.

Because our tongues are muscle, simply learning new information is not enough to train it properly. Just like any muscle, the tongue must practice the correct forms over and over. At first this feels very uncomfortable because your tongue has not developed "muscle memory" yet. Also, you have probably tried to make the correct sounds many times but did not learn it properly in the first place. In this case, you first have to "unlearn" your old tongue memory, then re-learn the correct movements.

Read something very slowly out loud to yourself. Feel how your tongue moves, flexes, advances, retreats. This dance gives life to our language. This muscle shapes the music of our voices.