This year, we kick-started the Baby Talk-a-thon, a study that aims to understand more about the speech that Singaporean babies hear in their day-to-day lives. We want to know what the speech environment is like for our little ones here in Singapore! Language scientists around the world are discovering that the kind of speech babies hear in their first 3 years makes a big contribution to early language development and how well kids do in school later on. However, at the moment, almost all of the information we have comes from one country (the USA) and one language (English). Our language landscape is very interesting, with lots of different languages, and lots of different language combinations in different families. The talk-a-thon will help us discover more about Singapore, and what strategies are the most helpful for Singaporean families.
So far, more than 100 families from Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil speaking families, all of whom also speak English, have signed up for our Baby Talk-a-thon and we’ve gathered over 1000 hours’ worth of recordings. This will help us to understand much of baby’s daily talk comes from which of the household’s languages, and the language mixes differ between different homes. We’d like to thank all mummies and daddies and especially the little ones for participating in our study!
The Family Name game: How do you call people in your family to your child?
Here in Singapore, some of babies’ first words are special red-dot words – this is what makes baby-talk in this part of the world special! The Red-Dot Words is a set of studies designed to help us to understand how people in Singapore use different kinds of words when they are at home. This helps us to find out more about the way Singapore’s children learn language in the preschool years. Previously, we asked people all over the country when they think children start learning these words and how these words are used. In the Family Name game, we want to hear the words parents use when talking about – or talking to – the people their little one sees regularly.
Our Bilingual Futures: A series of talks about the science of raising bilingual children in Singapore
A sizeable number of parents, caregivers, and researchers attended the event!
Dr Beth O’Brien giving a talk about reading and children’s language development
Dr Annabel Chen delivering a talk about the brain processes during reading
A slide from Dr Suzy Styles’ talk about translanguaging
We had a lucky draw at our booth!
The BLIP lab team <3
In the first session of Our Bilingual Futures, we hosted a series of talks and a follow-up Q&A session focusing on the science of raising bilingual children in a multilingual Singapore. Our expert panelists, Dr Suzy Styles (NTU), Dr Beth O’Brien (NIE), and Dr Annabel Chen (NTU) gave insightful talks about the shifting language environment in Singapore, the role of reading in children’s language development, as well as neurological processes and brain areas involved when we are reading. Attendees also received goodie bags and had the opportunity to visit the labs’ booths located outside the auditorium where they learnt about our ongoing studies. We even had a spin-the-wheel game and a lucky draw! Click here to read more about Our Bilingual Futures (The Science of Raising Bilingual Children): https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/our-bilingual-futures/
The second session was targeted towards families with children of an older age group – our expert panelists used examples from existing studies that looked at kindergarten children to talk about language development and how parents can use more than one language to foster bilingualism in their little ones. Click here to read more about Our Bilingual Futures (Achieving Bilingual Outcomes): https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/our-bilingual-futures-achieving-bilingual-outcomes/
We’ve also included the video recordings of the talks and Q&A sessions as well as the transcripts in the links above!
MERLIon CCS Challenge: Developing robust language identification and language diarization systems for non-standard, accented, spontaneous code-switched, child-directed speech
In other exciting news, BLIP Lab was pre-selected to host a special session for the INTERSPEECH 2023 conference! Aligning closely with the conference’s theme, we presented the challenge of developing robust language identification and language diarization systems that are reliable for non-standard accented, bilingual, child-directed speech collected via a videocall platform. The MERLIon CCS Challenge aimed to tackle automatic language identification and language diarization in a unique first-of-its-kind Zoom videocall dataset: a subset of audio recordings from our Talk Together Study, where parents narrated an onscreen wordless picturebook to their child. Three teams who participated in our challenge managed to beat our baseline system, improving our understanding on building robust systems for language identification for complex speech environments. The INTERSPEECH 2023 special session was held in August, where the three teams presented their winning system.
We’re excited to see what the new year brings us! BLIP Lab would like to once again thank everyone who has taken part in our studies. We hope to see you soon for more exciting things! Happy holidays and a joyful new year to you and your loved ones 😀
In Singapore, being bilingual is not uncommon due to the nation’s language policy to learn English as well as one mother tongue language. As such, most if not all children are brought up in bilingual environments where English and another mother tongue language are used at home. Depending on how often the languages are used, these interactions allow the child to be exposed to both languages and learn how they are related, e.g., knowing ‘bowl’ in English and ‘mangkuk’ in Malay.
A review by Hambly et al. (2012) compared studies investigating the influence of bilingualism on speech production. The main aim of the review was to look into the existing knowledge about the impact of bilingualism on children’s acquisition of speech in English and how this could help identify and treat speech sound disorder in bilingual children.
What did they find?
Among the findings gathered, bilingual children in general do not actually develop speech slower than their monolingual peers.
Studies found mixed results when comparing how bilingual and monolingual children with and without speech sound disorder acquire speech.
It is difficult to conclude if exposure to two languages in childhood is advantageous or disadvantageous.
Speech acquisition is qualitatively different in monolingual children compared to bilingual children. Particularly, children learning language in a bilingual environment make different sound errors and acquire sounds at different rates in comparison with their monolingual peers (Hambly et al., 2012).
It might be useful to note that many of these studies are conducted in places where monolingualism is the norm and bilingualism is the exception, which means that the findings may not represent the way children learn and use language in Singapore. However, the main takeaway suggests that there doesn’t seem to be concrete evidence that being bilingual is detrimental to a child’s language development.
Having said that, it appears to be increasingly common in Singapore in recent years for English to be used more heavily at home and with friends. This is possibly due to the ease of communication and accessibility since the use of mother tongue languages, especially in their formal versions, are usually limited to academic settings. Thus, children these days may find difficulty following through with mother tongue lessons in school as they have less exposure and interaction with their respective mother tongues on a daily basis at home.
How, then, can we inculcate mother tongue language use in everyday life? Parents can step up in this area by allowing their children to see the value in learning their mother tongue by relating simple words or concepts at home to their mother tongue. For example, teaching their children how to say phrases like ‘I took the bus to school’ or ‘I ate noodles for lunch’ in their respective mother tongue languages. By interacting with the language that way, they will likely feel less distant with the language and begin to appreciate their mother tongue more. It has also been an initiative carried out by libraries and language councils to promote the use of language through festivals like Bulan Bahasa (Malay Language Month) to encourage the community to embrace the use of Malay language in their daily lives.
This post was written by our Intern, Aqilah, and edited by our research staff, Shaza and Dr Rui Qi!
We’re still recruiting families (especially Malay and Tamil speakers) with children between birth to 4 years old for our Baby Talk-a-thon! If you’re keen to take part, you can register your interest here: https://ntusingapore.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK
In June, BLIP Lab took part in Our Bilingual Futures: Achieving Bilingual Outcomes, which was a series of talks followed by a Q&A session. This free seminar was the second installment of Our Bilingual Futures series, this time targeted towards caregivers of a slightly older age group of children than the first one.
Missed out on the talks by our speakers? We have some good news for you! The talks are now available on our YouTube page (to activate English subtitles, activate the CC option).
Dr Beth: We did some large-scale kindergarten studies in Singapore looking at children who are learning English plus one language, e.g., English-Chinese or English-Malay, and what we found is that early on in K1, when children are between four and five, they tend to transfer a lot of information about print. Once they start learning about the alphabetic principle for English, which is whether they understand that symbols represent speech and that parts of oral language are represented systematically by letters of lettered pairs, that type of understanding is something that can transfer across scripts. For Chinese, there’s a mapping between the spoken syllables and characters and this seems to show up in high correlations between children’s early reading abilities or letter identification abilities across languages.
But as they grow a little bit older and learn the specifics of the script like how the language is represented, that’s where some of the challenges come in. So children will have to differentiate, for example, that the different letters in Malay might represent different sounds than they do in English or that these other scripts have a different way of coding, not just a smaller scale of sounds but also a whole syllable. So naturally, [for] languages like Tamil or Chinese which have many more symbols to learn than just the alphabetic letters, this takes more time for them to acquire reading.
I think it’s just a matter of building on a whole repertoire of information that they know across languages, maybe helping them to compare. Just like you have sounds in English that are represented by these letters, you can identify that there’s other symbols that represent the sounds in Chinese or the sounds in Tamil, but they operate in a different way.
Prof Annabel: Learning language using different languages that they’re exposed to in the environment itself can help us depending on how you define resilience. There’s something about what we call a “productive failure” where we can learn from mistakes. In fact, sometimes mistakes are very useful to help us to learn new things and to have new information stick in what we call brain networks in our brain. So it’s like learning not to be fearful of mistakes, but rather, to have fun with that and then to see it as an opportunity to learn when we are doing all these new languages or new ways of playing with languages. That is a good opportunity to build resilience in that sense and to encourage curiosity in learning.
The period where the kids are starting to learn is what we call a very high plasticity time. That is where brains are changing very very quickly so they can learn very fast. And it’s not true that this specifically stops when we grow up, it still continues with age – it’s just at a slower rate. But in the early years it is the time to really harness it because it is changing so quickly. And we can shape it much more easier building resilience during this period, and I think it’s really important.
Dr Suzy: I have two things to add on. One from the very beginnings of life and one from the very end of life. There’s a concept in developmental psychology called secure attachment which is about how very young children form bonds that let them know that they are safe and loved that come from their adults in their life. And children who have this bond of secure attachment with their loving family members are more resilient to a variety of hurdles that life can throw at them.
Part of this secure attachment is going to be mediated by the effectiveness of parental communication with their kids right so part of this development is going to be linguistic. We’re going to use words when we talk with our kids about their feelings, we’re going to use words when we talk with their kids, about their needs and wants and desires and this can all be part of building resilient futures for our kids. And how you can navigate that space multilingually is going to differ depending on your own linguistic strengths in your different languages. It may be that you focus your mood and emotion talk in the language that you feel best able to support your kids’ moods and emotions and you focus some of your other linguistic behaviors like reading books together on the languages that you might feel less confident in at a particular time. But language is there all the way along in this secure attachment stage so I think that’s a lovely thought for the early years.
There’s another thing we can think of in the later years of life which is that it turns out older adults who have been bilingual in their earlier years – if they happen to have a brain injury or suffer a stroke, they are more likely to recover language skills if they were bilingual. So if you want to think about your children’s futures throughout their life course, not just their first few years, not just a secure attachment, if you want to set your kids up to have robust and resilient brains, bilingualism is good for the aging brain as well. That’s just another thing that you can think about.
Dr Suzy: I don’t think anyone in the world has evidence that one is faster. We know that there are some contexts called immersion contexts where if you have a school where 100 of the children are monolingual English speakers and you have one child from a different context and that child is dropped into this context where everybody only speaks English, then they can learn very quickly the language that everyone around them speaks. But that’s an immersion context where you have a minority and a majority and a wholly one language context and there are some situations where that sometimes occurs as part of the linguistic landscape. For example, with migrants, you don’t have a choice if everyone in the community speaks one language and it’s not the same as the one at home. We know that children can learn fast – however, when it comes to deeply multilingual communities, we don’t have evidence that it’s faster to pretend you don’t speak the other language.
Children are very clever and they get very annoyed very quickly if they think they’re being treated like fools so if they know you speak the other language and they’re trying their best to communicate their needs, you might be doing better to align with the secure attachment that the child is trying to develop and meet their needs in the language that is most effective at points where there might be an emotional breakdown, for example, while at the same time supporting their language development in the other language.
Some things that might work effectively are using the target language first but providing co-language support with the familiar language. This gives them the opportunity to build the neural network for the target language by using a former representation for the speech sounds, trying to figure out what the words are. But if they have no clue, you still want them to know what’s going on in their world and if they know you know how to say it, you’re just breaking down the relationship that the child of trust that the child has with you, to think that you’re a rational linguistic agent in their world, and so they would treat you as a liar. One of the things that is potentially interesting in this space is figuring out whether your school or your care context has a policy that you can share with parents about your preferred way of working or information that you can point parents to that might help them understand where your perspective is coming from. I think by the time we get into the school years it’s more common for a school environment to have a policy in place that they can disseminate with parents and explain their reasonings, but these are some things that you could think about for your different contexts.
Dr Beth: I think yes you could count it as being bilingual. French and English will have a lot more overlap so there’s the ability for the child to transfer these skills for reading more easily. And since they’re learning French in the school context and then there’s also English at home and English print all around Singapore, it’s easier for them to pick this up, whereas Chinese might take more of an effort for them to learn the print. There’s an extended period of time for learning written characters that is different from learning to read in the other languages. But one thing that we’ve also found for all of the mother tongues, particularly for Chinese, is that what contributes to literacy skills in younger children is their vocabulary. That’s a big component. Having a foundation where they know a large number of words in Chinese can help them with learning to read better.
Also, some of the skills that I talked about with morphological awareness where you can kind of play games with meanings of the characters and the words, and get them to build the understanding of the meaning units could also help them with developing literacy. And having them exposed to the language, there is some research on writing characters to copying characters for learning, and handwriting is helpful too. But I think especially in the public schools they’re a little worried about overdoing this, so you don’t have to have them copying so much so that they lose the anticipation and excitement about learning. I think just probably from the home being able to support them with exposure to words and then also mapping that to print as much as possible would be most helpful.
Prof Annabel: And also maybe to add a little bit from the brain perspective we do have research showing that learning different languages using what we call ‘embodied learning’, movement will be helpful but we do know that if we learn something it’s better to learn it from different sensory modalities. It could be hearing, it could be looking at pictures and then movement, or kids’ movement is really fun. One of the things that’s been mentioned is that learning needs to be fun for kids and if it is fun, they don’t even think it’s work, so it comes naturally. When we build brain networks, the more exposure and different modalities actually helps to strengthen those networks. When you talk about writing in Chinese it’s not just families with different languages but a lot of our kids who are Chinese English bilinguals don’t like to learn Chinese because the character writing is a little bit more difficult. So, teachers and schools have now come up with different strategies for certain words, e.g., they use body movement to represent the characters and to tell stories about those words, to help you to sort of remember them.
I would encourage you to think about fun ways to see how you can excite your child to learn about it and of course immersion like what Dr Suzy was saying is a huge thing. But it’s very challenging for parents so it’s almost like re-learning if our Chinese is not as good. As we learn together with them, reading story books together but in Chinese, or speaking if it’s possible, have designated times where you just try your best to speak that language with your child and try to not to use other languages at the same time. Those are various ways that we can increase the exposure of the language.
Dr Suzy: I’ll add just a couple of little ones – a lot of these streaming platforms these days have a lot of movies that your children might be familiar with that have language support in other languages. So, if you want to watch a Disney cartoon that happens to be in Chinese language with the Chinese language subtitles on you can be boosting print exposure at the same time as you’re boosting oral language exposure for content that your kids are already motivated to enjoy. That’s one nice little trick Dr Beth shared with us, quite a few little tips and tricks on word games that you can play with your kids that are sort of English-centered where you might be trying to find the sounds when you were reading a written word of English.
We can think creatively about ways that might map to other languages and other scripts so if you happen to be in a part of Singapore where there are hawker stalls that have some of their signage in Chinese, you might be able to play little games like let’s see if we can find all of the symbols that have animals in them so if you’re looking for the little legs at the bottom of the character for fish, for example, you can find the little legs and you know it’s an animal I’m talking about […] print in ways that might be more of a hunt, a hide and seek, or foraging game where you’re just trying to find or solve puzzles, or looking for the three little splashes of water for characters that have something to do with water for example and turning that into fun games when you’re out and about in the world. This might also help to provide backup, something that is an everyday part of life not just special occasions.
Dr Suzy: There’s a little bit of evidence about number systems that is quite interesting where the number system of Mandarin is much more regular. It doesn’t have weird words like ‘twelve’ and ‘thirteen’ right, it has tens and numerals that make sense in the number system and are always regular throughout. There’s a little bit of evidence that suggests that children who have learned their number words in Mandarin may have an advantage in early arithmetic learning – to do sums with two-digit numbers is a little bit easier if all of your words are lined up nicely just like the numbers are so that’s one little hack.
There’s a second little hack that is specific to Mandarin which is that the spoken words for the numbers are a little bit shorter than the spoken words or the numbers in English and the other mother tongues of Singapore. If your children happen to be learning to count in Mandarin, they will not understand the difference between three and four at a younger age – that seems to be biologically fixed across the whole globe – they will not understand the difference between four and five at an earlier age. However, they will be able to memorize longer numbers so if you’re trying to remember a phone number that someone has just told you, you can hold in mind a random set of numbers that is a longer sequence if you can repeat those sounds in rendering compared to others. So, it’s a little hack and bilingual children have the opportunity to use their linguistic resources in more than one way or boost their language understanding if they have representations of number space that can be used in different ways as well. But other than that, and these are both relatively small effects, most children end up at the same destination regardless of the path to numeracy, but that those are two features of the Chinese language in particular that we have evidence about.
Prof Annabel: Yeah, just to add on a little bit to the second point that Dr Suzy is mentioning is actually what we call ‘working memory’. It’s what we can put in our mind while we’re manipulating some information to get us somewhere, e.g., remembering phone numbers, we have to keep it in mind when it’s new so that we can write it down or to tell somebody else. You can imagine for Chinese characters in terms of digits it’s just one syllable. So, this is fifteen or four or other seven or multiple-syllable English numbers so the span in terms of syllable – you can actually squeeze in more numbers in terms of syllable than let’s say English or another language that has multi-syllables for one number.
But having said that, another thing that’s more generic is that we have found in both neural imaging research as well as cognition research that working memory actually supports both learning of language as well as numeracy or learning math. So you know if you could practice or work on working memory itself, there are some benefits in learning both languages and how they interact with each other. So right now we are looking into more research trying to understand how they are related with each other and also if we could improve any one of them one using either modality. But we’re still looking into more specifics of how to do that and why it works together.
Dr Suzy: I love that you’ve raised this question of identity and I think one of the complicated things to think about is that the very first years one of the things that our work tends to focus on is have we given our kids enough early on that their brain has grown in a way that will allow multilingualism to flourish. That’s early years flourishing that families like yours are working hard on, you know, supporting those early skills. When kids get a bit older, as you say, the way that they identify in language and the way they choose to position themselves in part is going to be based on what they think is cool and it can be very challenging to think about what does cool look like in different languages and where can we find the cool examples that will that will resonate with our kids.
Because at some point in our lives when we were little children we were very connected to our family and we identified with them. And at some point we didn’t want to become our own mothers, we wanted to become the kid who was like a year older with like the cool sneakers and that toy that I didn’t have that she had, you know, that was the person we wanted to be. It was a near peer or maybe it was a teenager on a talent show but like there were people we wanted to see ourselves as who were not our parents.
And so part of the challenge when we hit this transition between early childhood and the growth of an individual identity is where do we look for and how do we identify those near peers that can help our kids feel cool in the language of their mother tongue? How can we help them transition into young people who want to be in both their languages? And these are big and challenging issues and we might need to look to pop culture or look to, as I mentioned before, if we can watch popular child age-appropriate videos but with language support in the other language so that the cool cartoon character is cool but in our language – all of those things can help but I think these are the things that are perhaps very challenging for Singapore’s future if we want all the languages to be as strong as each other, not just present, but as strong, so I think this is a really great question.
Prof Annabel: Yeah in fact I do resonate with your feeling as a mother with kids growing up in Singapore as well. It’s challenging to maintain the ethnic identity and the language that they use at home and especially when they go to primary school you know things change very very quickly because they learn so fast. But one of the things I found really helpful like what Dr Suzy’s saying finding things that the kid really would be curious about and enjoy so one of the things is to think about cultural identity but also stories about that culture that they would want to learn more about that’s fun.
They will then explore and then you could tell those stories in the native language to engage them. And also I think one of the ways is the social media it’s about find[ing] as much information and when we talk about the Bilingual Futures, actually a lot of things are online nowadays but we are exposed to the English online world more than anything. But there are actually other worlds out there in different languages, so if you’re able to read, for example, Chinese or Tamil, or you know other kinds of languages and you go into the internet with sites that [are] completely in that language it’s almost like a different culture or different world, so it’s an exposure to another place. So curiosity, I think, is one thing that we could encourage and continue with our children as well [as] in ourselves to keep us learning and to keep those brain networks building continuously.
Dr Suzy: Just on that note, speaking of the internet, what are the things that our team has started focusing on recently is we are aware of, particularly for the Malay language, that the focus of the education system in Malay is on standard Malay as it has been formalized in dictionaries and books on grammar on how the Malay language works, but we’re also aware that the spoken version of the Malay language has features that don’t turn up in written formal Malay. But we found out and I mean, it should come as a surprise to no one but especially people who actually use Malay in their day-to-day conversations, that there is a rich world of written informal Malay conversations going on in everybody’s WhatsApps right when people message each other about whether they’re going to be home on time or not. there are new ways of writing Malay that are emerging as community standards but that have not been documented anywhere in the Singapore linguistic literature on Malay.
And so with our team we’re starting to work on what’s the day-to-day way of spelling different words in Malay, what’s the day-to-day way of representing the way people speaking casual language right, because we think that this is a very important part of linguistic performance and linguistic identity. Because you can choose whether you want to present yourself in writing as your most formal self or whether you’re being a bit casual in life right. So we think that’s an important potentially missing link for how we can engage with literacy activities, especially for young kids who might be at that transition point between who am I when I’m a lay speaker, can I be myself, can I write a play that is in the informal language that I use with my friends rather than an essay which is in the formal language of news readers right, can I be all of these things at once. And that might be part of the puzzle of forming a rich linguistic identity that covers the whole span of being in a language.
Dr Suzy: I would have to say that there’s limited evidence to date about the intersection between neurodiversity and multilingualism. However, just last year there was a very important paper published about whether it’s better for families to reduce the number of languages that are spoken with kids with developmental disorders so that they don’t get confused versus use all of the household languages with kids with developmental disorders. The logic behind this thinking goes: if we’ve already got one thing that’s complicated, maybe we should reduce the other things that are complicated for the child.
However, this paper has shown very clearly that it is better for the child’s outcomes to have access to all of the languages of the household that are normally used than to reduce the linguistic input for that child to just one language. this goes back to that issue of secure attachment and it goes back to that issue of learning how to socially be your full self if you have a family that has three languages in the home, and you speak to some people in all three languages and you speak to one person in only one language, they have a reduced opportunity space to learn how to interact socially and they have less backups.
This is something we haven’t talked about at all, but kids who are multilingual – if they forget a word in one language they can just use another one, they’ve got a backup plan right. Monolingual kids don’t have this option – if they forget a word, they’re stuck. But multilingual kids often have a backup plan and this is true also in cases of kids with developmental disorders, they can be more included in the full range of household activities if it is a family who has strong language skills in all their languages and would normally be using all of their languages right. So whatever is normal for your family is good for your kids with developmental disorders and the data are very very clearly in favor of not artificially restricting languages for kids with developmental disorders.
Prof Annabel: That’s very important information to keep in mind for autism spectrum disorder children. I think one of the challenges actually for them is language in terms of communication so the idea is how do we help them to communicate better or just communicate at home. So regardless of what language it is, I think it’s important to learn ways to communicate to bring across what is needed, but also the different ways to express their feelings or their needs or to develop communication skills now. Whether learning Chinese or for kids with ASD is different from learning English, it’s essentially the same process in learning language in general because you can imagine kids, let’s say in Chinese environments would need to learn to communicate in that language. So very similarly, either depending on what is spoken in your family environment and how they are brought across, it’s more important establishing the mode of communication than to emphasize which language. But it is in the school kind of environment perspective it will be very similar to what we do in learning the different types of languages.
Want to catch up on the previous seminar? Click here to read more about Our Bilingual Futures: The Science of Raising Bilingual Children.
As a Singaporean born in the United States, the only lifeline I had to my Mother Tongue (Mandarin) was literally my mother. Worried for my language ability, she taught me in every way she could: reading stories, reciting poems, physically guiding my handwriting; an experience in both English and Mandarin. The difference, however, was that at kindergarten ages, I had more formalised lessons in English than I did in Mandarin, which was almost exclusively taught to me by my mother. Comparatively, it could be said that the process was much more intimate than that in acquiring English. Perhaps because of this difference then, accessing my emotions through English was more foreign than I expected…
My sister and I
Where English is the primary operative language in Singapore, with much formal communication using it, I found it difficult to express myself fully through English—there would always be this gap, this invisible wall, between me and the other party no matter how I tried to put my sentences together. Meanings would get across, sure, and at the same time, the communication felt flat—was the depths of what I felt actually getting through? This concern showed glaringly in my interactions with my mother: wires would get crossed and we’d often misunderstand each other. For some unknown reason, on a random day, I tried talking to my mother in Mandarin about a complaint I had. What I realised, after switching to Mandarin, was that my ability to express myself had been enhanced. The ranges in tone and pitch in which I was able to express myself had expanded, allowing for a greater variety of ways I could express exasperation, joy, playfulness, my feelings in general, and allowed me to better communicate with my mother.
Understandably, many things affect expression through language, but I would like to think that thanks to the unique experiences I had in being exposed to Mandarin as a child, that it truly has led to it being my Mother Tongue.
This post was written by our new Junior Research Assistant, Xavier. Xavier was a Sociology student and speaks/uses English, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Singapore Sign Language (SgSL), French and German (in order of proficiency).
Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!
At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!
Over the years, I have picked up languages, little by little. And for me, knowing about different languages has helped me to build bridges and relationships with many groups of people throughout different stages of my life.
Growing up, my language environment at home was quite diverse. I was exposed to a lot of English, which my parents spoke at home. Sometimes, Mandarin was spoken at home, but less so. Besides English and Mandarin, I was also exposed to Hokkien at home as my grandparents stayed with my family until I was in Primary 2. Unfortunately, I did not learn much Hokkien from them, and mainly spoke in Mandarin to them. I could only utter short phrases or sentences in Hokkien to them, such as “jiak ba liao (吃饱了)!” (Ate already!).
While it was probably a conscious decision by my parents not to teach me Hokkien, I regret not learning Hokkien early in life. I often ended up using Mandarin for most daily interactions in Chinese, seldom replying to others with short Hokkien phrases. Yet, there have been times where I reply to seniors in Hokkien, and they become happier to hear my limited Hokkien.
In secondary school, I became friends with somebody who belonged to a common online community related to buses. (Yes, I have been interested in buses since I was young!) He introduced me to Cantonese music and Hong Kong dramas that he watched and listened to, and I slowly started listening to Cantonese music on my own. I also attempted to pick up a little Cantonese, although I currently can only utter short phrases without switching to Mandarin. Fortunately, there was once when I managed to give directions in Cantonese to somebody when I holidayed in Kuala Lumpur!
Besides knowing limited Hokkien and Cantonese, I have surprised people by speaking and writing in yet another language: Malay. In fact, I consider Malay to be my third language after English and Mandarin, on the virtue of my frequent usage of Malay almost daily. Additionally, I listen to Malay pop songs daily, with my favourite Malay singers including Arni Om and Nora.
While often a stylistic shift, I have used basic Malay to communicate with different groups of people I jumpa (Malay for meet), including my Malay friends and colleagues, as well as Malay hawker stall owners. In addition, I sometimes greet Malay bus captains (BCs) in Malay and have even made some BC friends through my greetings to them!
In Malaysia, while I can often get by using English, being able to speak and understand Malay has often come in handy. Similar to how I managed to give directions in Cantonese, being able to speak in Malay allows me to give directions to others who also speak Malay, including Malay Grab drivers. Additionally, speaking in Malay helps me to communicate better with Malay shop assistants, who often become friendlier towards me due to my knowledge of Malay.
While some of my peers do speak Malay, including my non-Malay friends, many of my friends are surprised to hear me speaking in Malay, or a mix of English and Malay. Besides hearing me speak in Malay, another thing surprising to them is how I only began learning Malay intensely in the second semester of Year 1 in university, after several years of wanting to pick up the language.
In my journey of learning Malay, there has been many struggles. Owing to a lack of knowledge of Malay vocabulary, and struggling in knowing what to say, I often speak slower than my Malay friends, and sometimes stumble in my speech. The road to learning Malay as a non-native speaker is still steep for me!
Yet, despite these changes, the benefits of learning Malay have been tangible. Through my usage of Malay, I have had warmer and friendlier conversations with both friends and strangers alike. Additionally, I have written posts on social media in Malay, albeit often in combination with English and sometimes Mandarin Chinese. My multilingual posts, and particularly my usage of Malay, have fascinated many friends who view my Instagram and Facebook posts, and compliment my Malay speaking and writing skills.
While becoming an effective communicator in Malay will be a lifelong journey, I am blessed that learning Malay has helped me to have closer relationships with my Malay friends and has given me a chance to engage with native Malay speakers more effectively and intimately. With Malay continuing to be an important lingua franca (“bridging language” between speakers of different native languages) in the region, I hope that my endeavours in Malay will continue to reach new heights, and that I may one day know how to write, speak and know Malay the best way I can.
Indeed, languages are bridges across cultures, ethnicities, and ages. Just like food, languages provide a common ground for all of us to unite and be harmonious as a society. With Singapore’s uniquely multilingual society, knowing different languages is a blessing that ties everyone together. And it is on this note that I hope you may appreciate the power of multilingualism, one way to a person’s heart just like food (yum!).
Makasih kerana baca pos ini! (Thank you for reading this post!)
Regards, Adik Andrew
This post was written by our intern, Andrew. Andrew is a Year 2 Linguistics and Multilingual Studies student with a Second Major in Theatre and Drama, likes to wear many hats, and speaks English and Mandarin, some Hokkien and Cantonese, and basic Malay.
Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!
At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!
As a Deaf person who grew up in a hearing family and later became part of the Singaporean Deaf community, I was exposed to a variety of spoken and signed languages which shaped my linguistic repertoire today. I was born hearing and grew up learning English and Mandarin Chinese like many other Singaporean Chinese. My parents had hoped for my sister and I to be effectively bilingual in English and Mandarin. As English was used extensively in school, my parents spoke more Mandarin to us at home. As I gradually lost my hearing over the years, it became more challenging for me to speak and understand spoken Mandarin, due to its tonal nature. I stopped learning Mandarin in my teenage years, and currently have a basic knowledge of Mandarin from what I could retain from my childhood. My strategy of learning English also changed from one that is more aural to one that is more visual, with my acquisition of signed languages.
It was in my early teenage years that my family and I picked up Singapore Sign Language (SgSL) together. As online learning resources for SgSL were limited back then, we started off learning American Sign Language (ASL), which shared many similarities with SgSL. We would learn a specific theme (i.e., animals, transport) each week, and each time we did not know the sign for an English word, we would look it up on the ASL dictionary. We eventually took SgSL classes, where we learned the language in its entirety from a native Deaf signer. My family now mainly uses sign supported English in our communication.
Through my language experiences, I discovered the role of language in shaping our identity. My process of learning signed languages and integrating into the Deaf community was not a smooth one. Before achieving proficiency in SgSL, I felt stuck between the Deaf and hearing worlds and was confused about who I was. I did not belong to the hearing community due to my inability to hear and effectively communicate through speech, neither did I belong to the Deaf community as SgSL was not my first language. This was a common struggle faced by many Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals who grew up without exposure to signed languages and the Deaf community. Additionally, it was difficult to relate to my hearing Chinese friends due to my lack of proficiency in Mandarin. I did not feel comfortable with the fact that I was ethnically Chinese, and yet I could not speak my own mother tongue.
However, with my increasing proficiency in SgSL and interactions with various Deaf signers, I learned that there is no one way to sign or to “be Deaf”. A diverse range of communication methods and sign varieties are used within the Deaf community, ranging from speech to sign supported speech, signing exact English, pidgin signed English and SgSL depending on an individual’s background and language exposure, and translanguaging occurred frequently. With this realisation, I began to embrace myself, my languages and the experiences I’ve had as a bimodal Deaf individual and gradually developed a sense of belonging to the Deaf community, while also gaining greater confidence in navigating the hearing world.
This post was written by our new Junior Research Assistant, Gigi. Gigi majored in Psychology and mainly uses English and Singapore Sign Language (SgSL).
Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!
At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!
When I was presented with the chance to try new things to fulfil my unrestricted electives in university, I jumped at the chance to learn a new language so that I finally would have something to say to my extended family members when they say, “Oh how nice! So how many languages do you speak?” when they find out that I major in linguistics. Linguistics is more of the scientific study of language and its intricacies rather than just learning multiple languages, but I thought it wouldn’t do me any harm to be able to humour them anyway.
On a more serious note, I had been wanting to learn a new language because I always felt like languages were the key to a multitude of experiences. There is also that famous quote that goes “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” The quote expresses that people would also view you in a more positive light if they saw that you were making an effort to learn and practise their language.
Learning a new language would be able to open so many doors and introduce you to a variety of things, an example would be media consumption in that language (How many of us watch K-dramas religiously despite not understanding the language but relying on subtitles? I’ve heard so many stories of people’s elation when they realised they didn’t need those subtitles as much as they used to!)
I was so excited and there were so many options to choose from, I made the decision to learn the German language. German was one of the language modules offered in my university, with some of the more popular ones being French, Korean and Japanese. I walked into the German classroom for my first lesson 30 minutes late, because I was a freshman and I couldn’t find anything around the university. Unfortunately, I also didn’t have the forethought to survey the place beforehand. I was filled with adrenaline (both from running up 3 flights of stairs trying to be less late and also because I was going to learn something new) and ready to begin my journey into the great unknown of the German language.
Alas, it didn’t take long for cracks to appear in my resolve. There was this completely new aspect that German had and it was called grammatical gender. I knew that languages such as French and Spanish used grammatical gender as well but German didn’t just have 2 grammatical genders, it had three! The third one was called ‘neuter’ and it meant that the word had a neutral gender, ie. neither masculine nor feminine.
Here I was as a child who doesn’t know anything about gendered nouns yet…
Coming from a background where both the languages I spoke – English and Tamil – didn’t make use of gendered nouns, I found myself in completely unfamiliar territory. There were sure to be over a thousand nouns in the language, was I meant to remember the gender for every single one of them? To my dismay, the answer was ‘yes’. I wasn’t sure how to go about learning gendered nouns because I never had to do that for Tamil and English. In the English language we have the all-encompassing ‘the’ as a definite article, and Tamil works a different way by not quite having an equivalent for ‘the’. In German however, we have ‘der’, ‘die’ and ‘das’, all of which translate to ‘the’ in English but in different genders. I found this out the hard way when I thought Google translate could help me with classwork and I ended up with “the, the, the”.
One of the many lovely flowers that I like photographing at Gardens by the Bay. But wait, is ‘flower’ masculine or feminine? Or neither??
With time (and a lot of guidance from my German teachers), I came to learn that the only way to master grammatical gender was to learn the gender of the noun together with the noun itself. Even though this seemed daunting, it was the most efficient way to get the gender right. Although some word endings would always go with a certain gender, like how words ending with -chen are usually neuter, this was not always a foolproof way to guess because there were always exceptions and special cases. There was also the issue of plural nouns, but fortunately they were always feminine.
The gendered articles also do not follow a fixed form, the case of the noun can affect how it appears in a sentence. Noun cases tell us how a noun is being used in a sentence, whether it’s an object, the subject, or taking another role. Combined with the cases, German has more than just three definite articles. Even though I’ve come a long way from the wide-eyed freshman that I once was, grammatical gender still remains something that stumps me at times despite moving on to higher levels of German.
One of the many charts that you’ll use while attempting to study German (definite articles and cases chart from germanwithlaura.com)
That being said, it does help to know that statistically most German nouns are feminine, followed by masculine and finally neuter. So if you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re forced to guess (think: German exams where you don’t have Google to help you), guessing ‘die’ would be the safest option.
I’ve learnt a lot in my journey of studying German and I still have a long way to go, but I’m thankful that I got to experience learning a language that makes use of gendered nouns. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m willing to continue despite the rising number of ‘der, die, das’ crimes I’ve committed. To answer that question from earlier, ‘flower’ is a feminine noun, ‘die Blume’. Of course, if you put it in different cases or add plurality it can become ‘den Blumen’ and ‘der Blume’. They do say practice makes perfect!
This post was written by our intern, Sheetal. Sheetal is a 3rd Year Linguistics & Multilingual Studies student, speaks English and Tamil, and is learning German!
Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!
At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!
My experience with multilingualism has been pretty colourful. I speak English and Mandarin and can speak and understand Cantonese and Hokkien, though a little less fluently. But my first real experience of having to speak in a third (fifth?) language out of real necessity was when I went on exchange to Korea last year.
The initial level of panic and anxiety I experienced was indescribable. At first, something about speaking in another language in front of actual people was really anxiety-inducing for me.
The longer I stayed in Korea, the easier it got for me to calmly listen to, understand and respond to locals who spoke to me in Korean. However, high-stress situations (e.g., dropping your phone on the floor when paying a taxi driver at Jeju Airport, not realizing until the taxi drives off and your flight departs in an hour) completely wiped every single language from my brain aside from English. I guess the panic and urgency must have overridden other considerations aside from needing to quickly and clearly communicate what I needed at the time. (Travel tip: always use a ride-booking app overseas so you can track the vehicle down when you lose something).
The biggest test of my Korean to English/Mandarin skills was when my family and I visited a wood craftsman’s studio. The constant stream of “Lisa, ask him what this is/when he made this/if he made all this by himself/what else he uses the studio for”, asking him the questions, comprehending his answers and translating them back was more tiring than I expected it to be.
There are also some words in Korean that mean rather specific things, that I suddenly wouldn’t be able to remember when I needed them (tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, hahaha). For instance, there’s a word specifically for getting a job after you graduate. The artist had asked me about my older sister’s career, and I simply could not remember that specific word until hours later (취직하다 chwi-jik-hada, in its root form).
A photo of when I was a baby! Back then, I didn’t know that I had to be a translator for my family…
The overall experience was still positive, I would say. Learning new languages and picking up new skills is always fun and a good activity for your brain. It’s important to find ways to use these skills and practise these languages, so that the information stays relevant and accessible.
Some advice: don’t worry about not being able to remember those specific, advanced words! Using simple words for what those words mean gets the message across fine, and it’s actually often what locals tend to do as well. Also, native speakers are a lot more forgiving than you expect them to be. They already appreciate your efforts to learn, and they will not laugh at you for making mistakes unless they’re really mean, in which case you’re better off not speaking to them either. Have fun!
This post was written by our intern, Lisa. Lisa is a 4th year student majoring in Psychology, and speaks English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and Korean.
Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!
At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!
Primary school felt like aeons ago and my memories of it are pretty much hazy, but I still recall that in my small neighbourhood school, my everyday conversations with friends comprised mainly of Singlish with a liberal usage of Mandarin Chinese. This was something that I was comfortable with, for it is the language that my parents brought me up with. A Chinese-heavy version of Singlish became my default conversing language, even during the secret monologues and quips in my mind!
They say secondary school is a world of difference from primary school, and that rang true for me. My secondary school was quite westernised, where friends all seemed to speak perfect English, but were conversely weaker in Chinese. Chinese was seen as a “subpar” language, and everyone seemed to hate it.
And so my adolescent brain crafted a secret motto: “English is good, Chinese is bad”. My comfort in Chinese gradually twisted into shame and distaste– I was ashamed that I was comfortable with Chinese, and that my family spoke in a mix of broken English and fluent Chinese.
But the truth is, Chinese is a beautiful language in its own way. There wasn’t really a watershed event that subverted my unfair notions; it was a gradual change that came with experience. Interestingly, it wasn’t the old poems we were forced to recite in class that hammered this understanding into me– it was the lyrics of mandopop songs. As I grew older and read more into song lyrics, I began appreciating languages more. I found the lyrics of some Chinese songs strangely poetic; the words used are concise, yet hold so much.
Maturation also meant the realisation that it was foolish to dislike a language that has done no harm to me. Why should I be ashamed of a skill that helps me to form bonds with people? Much less a skill that has been an essential ingredient in my family’s relationships.
My Chinese capabilities now aren’t on par with what it was like during ‘O’ Levels, but my reconciliation with the language has certainly persisted through time. 🙂
This post was written by our intern Joan. Joan is a 3rd year student majoring in Psychology and Biological Sciences and speaks English and Mandarin.
Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!
At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!
My American friend repeated quizzically. I thought: how does one refer to a stranger outside of Singapore? “I meant an old man, some stranger,” I corrected myself.
I was relaying an anecdote to my friend, who is American and has no understanding of Singlish whatsoever, including the fact that the noun ‘uncle’ can refer to any man from an older generation who may or may not be a relative. It took me this moment to realise how idiosyncratic our unique blend of colloquial English is. I was spending my semester abroad in upstate New York, and found that my code-switching capabilities were unexpectedly running short.
How difficult can it be? I speak English too, and with Singapore being no stranger to the effects of American cultural imperialism, the majority of Singaporean youth have a grasp on how the Americans talk based on binging episodes of American television, consuming American products and listening to American musicians.
Instead, I still found myself at times trying to explain what ‘sia’ or ‘leh’ meant, oftentimes failing to come up with an understandable definition and feeling embarrassed at simultaneously looking like a ‘failed’ Singaporean and feeling like I speak broken English. Growing up in the shadow of the ‘Speak Good English’ movement, I was inculcated with the knowledge that Singlish is detrimental to one’s social standing and hinders their upward mobility. And yet, Singlish has never been any less removed from the common Singaporean vernacular of today. In fact, those that consciously attempt to separate themselves from Singlish seem to only face ridicule and are accused of being supercilious.
What does this mean about our perception of language? More than just a tool for communication, it is a marker of our national identity and represents our shared history: there are vestiges of Standard British English mixed with lexical borrowings from our 4 official languages to produce a cocktail of a language that is singularly unique and non-standard. I found myself conflicted by the government’s attempts to eradicate a wonderful shared creation, and even though the Singaporean government has switched its stance in recent years by acknowledging Singlish’s unifying force and even celebrating it, the widely-held perception that ‘Singlish is bad’ remains, my aforementioned feelings of shame included.
I am still learning to accept the beauty of Singlish: my difficulty in defining a Singlish term is simply a testament to its profound complexity, and my inability to completely desert it in my vernacular only speaks to my own enduring bonds to my home country. Speaking to a fellow Singaporean friend who had also just returned from the States, we both lamented at how hard it was to communicate with a non-Singaporean for a prolonged period of time because only Singlish, in its diversity and emotional depth, is able to effectively bring across the truest sense of what we mean. How does one translate into words the despair associated with the term ‘sian’, the pleasure associated with ‘shiok’ and the simple joy of exclaiming ‘gao dim!’ at the end of a tedious and difficult task? As a celebrated linguist once said: “A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.”
This post was written by our intern, Charlotte. Charlotte is a 4th year student majoring in Public Policy and Global Affairs and speaks English and Mandarin.
What do you call the people around you? Do you call strangers ‘uncle’ and ‘auntie’? Do you use these same words for family members? We’re interested to find out more about these ‘kinship terms’ used in Singapore! Participate in our online study here: https://ntusingapore.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6WgBjxXcjSM3IvI
Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!
At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!
