Photo by Tj Holowaychuk on Unsplash

Christmas in my household has always been “different”. My family has our own set of traditions, almost bordering on idiosyncrasy. We celebrate Christmas on the 24th, eat sushi with our Christmas ham, and stay up late to count down to Christmas like one does for the new year.

This year, the Christmas (eve) dinner felt different. It was quieter and more subdued. Our dinner conversation revolved around vaccines and embarrassing stories of telecommuting. Nothing a good old-fashioned biomedical lesson (with a sprinkle of statistics) to put your language skills in place. My mother only speaks Mandarin and Hokkien, armed with a handful of English phrases she picked up from watching American TV crime shows. After many rounds of poor translations from my sister and I, we managed to convey the technology of the mRNA vaccine, though I am pretty sure we did its sophistication no justice. My mother marvelled at its technology and described the old-school vaccines she had in the 70s which left scars (we never quite figured out what it was for – smallpox? BCG?) that served as a physical mark for her generation. By the end of the dinner, over some homemade chocolate pudding, we were discussing our favourite YouTube cooking channels, while I translated cooking terms between Mandarin and English for my sister and her.

Family conversations in my household have always been like this growing up, we switch from one topic to another and trade in English, Mandarin and Hokkien. We pause, hemming and hawing, searching for an equivalent (or close enough) word to get our stories across. We always managed to accommodate, switch between languages and translate on the fly. Sometimes my sister, my father and I talk in rapid-fire English and I see my mother smiling and nodding; I would translate to her what was said briefly, and she would tell me she kind of understood. 

I think a lot about my proficiency in Hokkien, and how it mirrors my mother’s proficiency in English. I produce a few words and understand a whole lot more. I can’t put my finger on why it bothers me a little that I am not proficient in it, or what being proficient in it really means to me. It reminds me of an early childhood memory, standing in the kitchen, making a conscious choice to pick up Hokkien so I could “be an adult” and speak with my grandmother who lived with us. 

Now, years after she passed, I hardly use it anymore. I still use Hokkien now and then, a smattering of phrases at home, a listening aid for eavesdropping on conversations in public. I hold onto these bits and pieces of Hokkien, even when my parents and peers tell me how “weird” and “uncouth” it sounds. I think, now, mostly, it reminds me of my grandmother smiling and nodding at my little bits of Hokkien mixed with Mandarin.

This post was written by our research assistant Victoria, BLIP lab’s newest member! She’s currently working on the language mixes project. Besides English, Victoria also knows Mandarin, Hokkien, and a little bit of Japanese.

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“Aunty, lo hor! Aunty, lo hor!”, I yelled as I ran across the HDB corridor to my neighbour’s door. I banged on the door as I repeated the message hoping that she heard me soon enough to take in her almost crisp-dry laundry hanging out on the galah. Earlier in the day, I had started it with “B, A, ba, C, A, ca, baca. S, A, sa, Y, A, ya, saya…” in my Malay as a Second Language (presently referred to as Mother Tongue) class. Growing up, there was a plethora of languages—my mother and the neighbour, who always depended on us to keep her laundry dry, chatting away in Hokkien, the wonderful next-door aunty married to the Eurasian man of Dutch ancestry coming over every tea-time without fail to have a chat with my mother in Malay, Teochew and Hokkien, and speaking to us children in English, the immediate neighbour on the left who only spoke Hailam and thus, by default my mother’s conversations were in ‘broken’ Hailam with her, and my paternal grandmother complaining in Tamil to my mother that her children are constantly speaking in English and not Tamil—in the air.

As a child, I had clear signs of what language to use with whom in the household – English with my father, who had made the conscious choice of using English with the children for pragmatic reasons, Tamil and English with my mother who knew better then to speak to us children in Hokkien lest she upsets her mother-in-law who was already unhappy with the increasing usage of English in the household, Tamil with my grandmother, and English, the natural choice, with my siblings.

As a parent, I now have made a conscious choice of what languages I use with my children: English mainly, while their father uses Tamil. Of course, my children also hear Malay, which is our secret coded language when my hubby and I don’t want them to know something. How different was the language environment when you were growing up compared to your children’s?

Shamala recently joined our team as a Research Fellow. She graduated with a PhD in Psychology from the University of Reading in 2016, where she worked on bilingualism and how it affects language processing and cognition. Shamala has since worked at many different places, including NTU, NIE, JCUS, and SUSS. She’s currently working on the Language Mixes project.

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Last month, BLIP Lab has launched an exciting new project called Talk Together! Click here to find out more about how you can join us in investigating how Singaporean children’s language development may change with us spending extended time with them under these post-Circuit Breaker circumstances.

My love for reading started out when I was very young and was further encouraged by my parents who shared a love for reading too! When I was little, I would pick out my favourite bedtime story to read every night, tucking the book under one arm and dragging my dad or my mum’s hand with my other arm to the reading corner. At first I always wanted to read only the English books – Aesop Fables, Peter and Jane series, anything Enid Blyton. I truly enjoyed escaping to another world in these stories fascinated by usage of sound words, descriptive words etc that make way for vivid imaginations.

But as a Tamil teacher, my mum started to get worried that I was not enjoying the Tamil language as much. She felt I needed to be well versed in my mother tongue too. To help me to enjoy reading in Tamil as much as I did in English, she would compile newspaper clippings, share storybooks filled with illustrations and colour, bring us to watch Tamil movies and stick up reading charts. This all helped to make sure my growing love for reading was balanced between my languages.

Also, by making reading fun and supporting my love for reading in both languages, I realize my parents have helped me to practise my bilingual language skills from a young age. Even to this day, I’m well-versed in both English and Tamil, and still enjoy reading stories in all my languages! What is the most fun thing you do in each of your languages?

This post was written by our Research Associate, Eshwaaree, who’s the only Tamil speaker in our team! She graduated with Master of Education in Developmental Psychology last year and is currently working on our language mixes project.

Want to know more about the fun things we’re working on?

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

My multilingual experience is best characterised as “late multilingualism”. Bilingualism attained early in life, either through the simultaneous acquisition of two languages at home or through early exposure to a second language before the completion of first-language acquisition at around age 5 is usually referred to as early bilingualism. So as a child I was monolingual, only speaking Chinese Mandarin. As some of you might be aware, in mainland China (as in Singapore), we have a lot of Chinese dialects. I would like to share stories of my dialect learning.

I spent my childhood in Jiangxi province, and lived mainly with my mother’s family. My grandparents were migrants from another province, hence my family conversed in a dialect different from the local Jiangxi one. They tried to teach me some words in their own dialects, and never encouraged me to learn the local dialect, as they deeply loved their own hometown and the culture. However, that didn’t stop me from learning the local  dialect from my friends in school.

Soon, I spoke the local dialect very well. I enjoyed talking, yelling and even swearing (which is not very good) with my friends in the local dialect. I kind of had to hide the fact that I can speak the local dialect from my family, as they were already a bit sad that I couldn’t speak their dialect very well. This small language conflict became a significant childhood memory. I knew how language related to one’s identity since then.

The dialect of the place I live is part of the Wu Chinese family. It has more vowels than Mandarin, and is one of the oldest languages in China. It’s not as hard as Cantonese for non-speakers to understand. I guess it’s probably because of the dialects I’ve been hearing since I was young that I have been open to learning the local languages wherever I go.

This post was written by Han, our Research Fellow. Beyond Chinese dialects, Han is also fluent in English and Japanese! Last year, she graduated with a PhD in Developmental Psychology. She’s working on language mixes project right now, with a focus on EEG.

Click here for more stories on our multilingual memories!

When my language skills became more developed as a child, a phrase that I would repeatedly (and perhaps excessively) say to my family was “humuhumu nukunuku āpuaʻa”. This is thanks to my Hawaiian-Chinese Uncle Byron, who is not actually my uncle by blood, but is definitely considered ʻohana*. This is the story of how Uncle Byron exposed me to another language that was not English (my native language) during the early years of my life.

I was fortunate enough to spend the first six months of my life in Honolulu, Hawaii, due to my father’s job assignment there. While I do not remember too much about my time there as an infant, I do remember Uncle Byron (as well as my father’s other Hawaiian colleagues) speaking to me and my sisters in Hawaiian. He bought us what eventually became my favourite childhood book; “Let’s Call Him Lau-wiliwili-humuhumu-nukunuku-nukunuku-āpuaʻa-ʻoiʻoi” by Tim Meyers. The book is intermixed with Hawaiian and English, and is about the journey of two different species of fish, the humuhumu nukunuku āpuaʻa (triggerfish) and lauwiliwilinukunukuʻoiʻoi (longnose butterflyfish), figuring out what to name their child. My sisters would pester Uncle Byron to read that book to us all the time. He happily obliged and read it in English and Hawaiian. When he needed a break from reading the book, he would play the ukulele and sing Hawaiian songs to us.

While I never continued to learn Hawaiian, I am forever grateful to Uncle Byron for piquing my interest to learn more than one language.

* ʻOhana means “family” in the Hawaiian language

This post was written by our Research Assistant, Seraphina, who works on the language mixes project, and from time to time, designs cute “lab swag”. Check out our Red-Dot Baby-Talk game to spot her kawaii food drawings!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

I first learnt English in secondary school. For most of my childhood and adolescence, I only spoke Vietnamese. Back in my country, English was a required subject in school. There was hardly any difference to us between learning English and Math. You learn some grammatical structures and words as you would mathematical formulas, and then you make some sentences. I had no strong feelings towards learning English at all. I never used it to communicate outside my classes.

After I graduated, I started to use English formally for the first time for my diploma degree, as the materials were all in English. However, the teaching was still delivered in Vietnamese. Although I understood the material, I never really learnt how to speak the language. It wasn’t until I came to Singapore when I started to pick up conversing in English as the courses were all taught in English.

I use English daily now mostly for research and talking to my colleagues and friends. Yet, I still can’t really use English outside of these contexts. For instance, I don’t understand much when I listen to music or watch movies without subtitles. English as a language has much more depth than what I have acquired. It’s not just a tool to learn some facts. People sing their hearts out with it. People share their life stories with it. It’s a safe where people keep their thoughts and memories. It’s English as a human language that helps speakers of it to speak, to read, to share, to feel, to be aware, to remember, to understand and to be understood. I may spend many more decades using this language and still be unable to unlock the intricacies and beauty of this language, something that many of you who are native speakers can do effortlessly. Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that worth keeping? 

I wish everyone a wonderful International Day of Multilingualism.

This post was written by Tuan Anh, our Research Fellow. He came to Singapore in 2008, and now he’s our knowledge engineer, computational linguist, and IT expert!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!