Growing up in a bilingual (English and Tamil speaking) household, my sister and I were able to pick up both languages easily. As proof of our bilingual abilities, my uncle still has embarrassing home videos of us singing theme songs from every Tamil soap opera to ever exist in the early 2000s. Despite this, conversing in Tamil just did not feel authentic to me at that time. I don’t know if this was a deliberate decision made by my parents, but at home, our dad would only speak to us in English and our mum would speak to us in Tamil. We used to speak to them both in English even though we were perfectly fluent in Tamil. I would be too shy to speak in Tamil to any of the adults in the family because then they would make fun of my pronunciation or word choice. We only ever spoke Tamil to our grandmother because she could not really understand English.
As I grew older, these feelings changed, thankfully, and I saw myself choosing to speak Tamil when conversing with family and eventually that helped me become more fluent. I know most bilinguals will relate with me when I say that there are some things that can only ever be accurately expressed in your mother tongue.
Both my parents and the rest of my family can also speak Malay fairly well. My dad actually took Malay as his Second Language (now known as Mother Tongue) in school. Malay was the language that the adults in my family used, to discuss matters that were not meant for us kids to hear. When I was younger, I remember my sister and I relentlessly trying to figure out what the adults were talking about whenever they spoke in Malay. We mostly failed in our attempts and only went as far as figuring out our nicknames, ‘besar’ (big) and ‘kecil’ (small). I think it’s safe to say creativity was not their strong suit or rather it wasn’t the priority.
Being raised in multilingual Singapore also meant that the community here spoke a type of Tamil that is unique to this part of the world. The Tamil spoken in this region, has some Malay lexical borrowings among other differences. Tamil speakers here almost always use certain Malay lexical items (instead of the Tamil equivalent) even when the word appears in a Tamil sentence. Needless to say, my younger self was baffled when I came to know that words like ‘udang’ and ‘senang’ that I often used when speaking Tamil, were not actually Tamil words.
I appreciated being bilingual and just language in general, more than ever, as a Linguistics major in university. I picked up very basic Mandarin and Hindi as electives in university just to experience learning a new language all over again. Sadly, I don’t recall much of it now but I’ve learned that knowing a language means so much more than just being able to speak, read and write it. It means having access to understanding and appreciating a whole culture because culture is significantly encoded in language.
This post was written by our newest lab member Vinitha (the one on the right)! Vinitha speaks Tamil and English and is currently working on the language mixes project.
At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language! Click here to read more Multilingual Memories: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/tag/multilingual-memories/
If you have a child between the ages of 0-4, you might be interested in our Baby Talk-a-thon Study! Click on the following link to sign up: https://ntuhss.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK
Visit our BLIP Blog for more information about our Talk-a-thon study: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/