As our Research Fellow prepares for a July 2023 graduation back in York, England, UK, she reflects on translanguaging away from home.
“I got on the bohs” was the first thing I heard in a local Yorkshire accent. I thought, “ohh that’s lohvleh!” which was the second thing I heard. (Quickly, guess what these two words are before you read on!) This – after a long flight with long queues at immigration, a missed connection, a rebooked flight, with eventual 6-hours-later-than-expected university bus pick-up from Manchester airport – was fun to hear. What a way to uproot yourself from your comfort zone into the unknooown delay of planes, trains and automobiles eh. The Northern accent is quite easy to pick up – all the short ‘ah’ sounds are more like ‘oh’, hence ‘bus’ becomes bohs and ‘lovely’ (pronounced lahv-ly in the south of England, pronounced lef-ly by Singaporeans :D) becomes lohvly – I spelled it differently above for more dramatic flair. I feel like the accent is very homey, very 亲切 (qin1qie4 in Mandarin), a bit different from the ‘Posh English’ that we may think of whenever we learn that someone is from England.
(Incidentally, 亲切 is a word that I’ve found hard to translate into other languages. Google Translate offers me: kind, cordial, intimate, gracious, familiar, close, dear, approachable, bosom. I would think it’s a combination of the words in bold.)
Most people identify other Singaporeans by their ‘lah’s. Not me. One day, in the graduate student common room, I heard someone say ‘Wah lau eh, so late already’. I immediately sprang to her, “Are you Singaporean!?” “Yes, are you?” “Yes, oh my god, I haven’t heard ‘wah lau’ in 2 weeks.” She immediately went, “Wah lau wah lau wah lau…” So obliging, I appreciated it a lot.
Translanguaging, more commonly known as ‘code-switching’, is a more general judgement-free way to think about code-switching. It centres the person as a whole being with all their languages in their repertoire. Maybe there is no ‘switching’ of codes, maybe it’s not a conscious choice to use one word over the other, maybe it’s just one big dictionary of all the cats and kucing-kucing (‘cats’ in Malay) in our heads. So how did I, biggest proponent of translanguaging, manage to survive my 3ish years in an multilingual university environment where our common language was likely only English? I reaaally had to exclude the non-English words. But we learnt from each other: they picked up aiyo from me; in return, I said bohs for them. So my translanguaging in the UK looked a little different from that in Singapore – where I may use an English/Mandarin/Malay/Tamil/Hokkien/Teochew word, I would use a British-ism instead.
The Singapore Society in York was where I went to town speaking all the languages I knew. Finally, it was a safe space for me not to have to use up so much brainpower sifting through the words that I could use. If I wanted to say “eh 做莫 (zuo4mo4 in Singapore Mandarin, meaning ‘why’ but pronounced in a slightly stylised way as well) you liddat wan! You make the shelf senget (‘tilted’ in Malay) already!” in anguish, I very well could. Imagine if I had to translate all of that into Posh English!
If any of the York SingSoc are reading this, hello, thank you for being my home away from home. Let me know if you want souvenirs from York!
This post was written by our Research Fellow, Rui Qi.
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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Rui Qi is currently running a Family Name Game alongside the main Baby Talkathon 2023 research study. Click the link or scan the QR code to find out more!
