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.