Hello! I’m Eshwaaree. I come from a Singaporean English-Tamil speaking background at home and have always enjoyed learning and reading languages. When I was little, my parents’ focus was on me acquiring a good grasp of English and Tamil. However both my parents are also fluent in Malay! My dad was born in Malacca and had to learn Malay in school while he spoke Tamil at home. My mum picked up conversational Malay from her parents and neighbours in Singapore in accordance with true kampung* spirit, a sense of community and living style that Singaporeans shared, especially in the past.

As for me, as fluent as I am in English and Tamil, I mixed around so much with friends of other backgrounds such as Chinese and Malay, which is impossible not to do as a Singaporean with our wonderful mixing pot of people coming from at least four different ethnicities. As a result, I have come to be able to recognize and understand and even sometimes speak simple Chinese and Malay words.

It is truly fascinating when I think about it, that regardless of age, the surroundings one is in allows you to pick up different languages even at a basic conversational level. I see Singaporeans of all backgrounds, all ages and all walks of life recognizing and using words of varying languages be it conversations between friends, or daily activities like ordering food. It indeed seems like in Singapore every day is a Multilingualism Day!

*kampung: ‘village’ – When we imagine a traditional kampung we think of clusters of small timber houses with palm-leaved or corrugated zinc roofs.

Eshwaaree is a Research Assistant in the BLIP Lab, working on the Singapore Talk-a-thon as part of the Language-Mixes Project

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Today, for the International Day of Multilingualism we’ll be sharing lots of stories about multilingualism in Singapore – what it’s like to grow up in such a multilingual place, how different people feel about their different languages, and some of the core research questions we are working on as a team.