唐诗三百首 (‘300 Tang poems’ in Chinese) is what I recall reciting to the extended family every Saturday at Grandma’s house as a wee 3-year-old. Unfortunately, as the years went by, I could not perform on demand anymore, because rehearsal is needed to sustain memory traces, who knew (I only learnt that 20 years later in my undergraduate Psychology class). My mum believed that ‘Mandarin is difficult to learn, easy to master’ (and ‘English is easy to learn, difficult to master’) therefore she wanted to drill Mandarin into me first… via Chinese literary work. (But my dad is almost exclusively English-speaking so… I don’t know what his contribution was in my early years.) I also lived with Teochew-speaking paternal grandparents in my childhood years and visited my aforementioned Hokkien-speaking grandmother on Saturdays so I had plenty of exposure to the Chinese languages all around. English and Mandarin are definitely my primary languages; I am also a big speaker of and advocate for Singlish. I think I speak Hokkien better than Teochew, albeit apparently it’s Teochew-accented Hokkien, so that’s fun. My tip for speaking Teochew is – use Hokkien lexis, but gentler. It works… 70% of the time.
In university, I took Linguistics modules that described our Singaporean particles (or ‘discourse markers’, as we call it in the BLIP Lab) with such linguistic precision and flair; I also took a Psychology module called ‘Language and Cognitive Processes’ where I learnt that one was able to do research about the vibrant language environment in Singapore – and thus my research career was born. Studying nonword repetition, reading and spelling in both Mandarin and English in our local population is endlessly fascinating: all the different cross-linguistic characteristics showing up where you least expect them.
Doing my PhD in the UK made me really try to make sense of my identity. What does it mean to be speaking in any of the other languages I knew in a largely monolingual English-speaking crowd? Why can’t they understand lah and lor and why must I cater to their accents? It made me hold close the colourful languages I knew but was unable to share with many. Over the past few years, I also decided to learn Baba Malay, which was my late paternal grandmother’s heritage. Apa khabair? Lu sua makan belom? (How are you? Have you eaten?) I learnt that it was a healthy mix of Hokkien and Bahasa Melayu lexis (with some spelling differences), unsurprising as those were the roots of the people who mingled and formed the community. Again, its endangered status is making me hold the language closer to me – what will become of the language when its speakers are no longer around? Gek sim (Hokkien/Teochew for a kind of deep aching in the heart) leh.
Photo by Baba Malay.
To end on a lighter note, I am very excited to be burrowing deep into the transcription and translation of multilingual speech in Singapore! The vibrance, the vivaciousness (vivacity?), ooh!
This post was written by our newest Research Fellow Rui Qi! She is currently working on the language mixes project with the team. Besides English, Rui Qi speaks Mandarin and a little bit each of Hokkien, Teochew and Baba Malay.
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!