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/

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