How we cite our quotes: (Line)
Quote #4
And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
your mother tongue would rot,
rot and die in your mouth (10-13)
This seems like a legitimate fear. Languages are a lot like muscles. If you don't use them, you tend to lose them. Without the opportunity to speak in your home tongue, it could be possible that you would lose fluency over time. What's worse for our speaker is that doing so would separate her from an important connection to her sense of self.
Quote #5
it ties the other tongue in knots,
the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth, (33-34)
Here we have a kind of survival of the fittest. We can just imagine the native tongue saying, "This mouth ain't big enough for the both of us." Is that how language really works, though? It sure seems to in our speaker's estimation.
Quote #6
Everytime I think I've forgotten,
I think I've lost the mother tongue,
it blossoms out of my mouth. (36-38)
This final image is a hopeful one. Maybe it's harder to lose your native tongue than the speaker fears. Or maybe, because this is only really happening while she dreams, our speaker is simply fantasizing here. It's never made clear, but we'd like to think that our speaker keeps her connection to her home language, since it's obviously so important to her.