Return to a discussion today that has followed me for most of my life. It involves the use of "amn't", and whether or not this is proper English! "Am not I going to church?", seems to just come out as "amn't I" when I speak or write! I'm told this should be "aren't I?", but that sounds daft to me! How can you say "I aren't" or "I are not"? That seems like bad bad English to me! However, I hear this "aren't I?" stuff being said by folk with plummy voices all the time! Of course, "aren't we?" is quite correct! Why not "amn't I?"?
I know some great academics in the English language, and the Rector of Falkirk who is always correcting ma spellin', read this blog and are maybe best placed to comment, but my mammy drilled "amn't I" rather than "aren't I" into us from an early age, and I'm loathe to stop using it!
You and your mammy are absolutely correct, gramatically and sense-wise. The people who say "Aren't I" are beset by the same desperate desire to sound posh as the poor souls who use "I" when it should be "me" (As in "You have been very kind to my husband and me" - which folk are fooled into thinking should be "I"). I spent my whole teaching life wrestling with this one and encouraging my pupils to listen out for people who should know better getting it wrong.
"Am I" is singular; "Are we" is plural: a contraction makes absolutely no difference, just as position in the sentence does not affect the relationship between verb and pronoun.
OK?