I am a Chinese Malaysian who was born and raised in Singapore. The fun thing, linguistically, about growing up in Singapore but spending a significant amount of time in Malaysia is that you end up being exposed to a much larger range of languages and also to a greater extent. My parents both understand Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, English and Malay and speak all the above languages to different extents, so I grew up hearing a lot of language-mixing: questions can be asked in one language and answered in another. My parents don’t think it’s impressive that they can speak and understand so many Chinese dialects and languages because they have been taught to believe that only “Mandarin” and ‘English” are viable. Please don’t think like that. All languages and dialects are beautiful.

 My father is Cantonese and my mother is Hokkien. The fact that I never picked up Hokkien and started speaking Cantonese as soon as I could speak. I thought it was chalked down to the naturalness of patriarchy, but actually, it was just because no one really spoke Hokkien much around me. I gradually lost the use of Cantonese, though, because of the bilingualism education policy of Singapore, we were only regularly exposed to English and Mandarin. One of the reasons why I enjoy linguistics is that I get to examine how language policies such as the bilingualism education policy of Singapore shapes language beliefs and attitudes. We commonly come across people who think that all Indians in Singapore speak Tamil (not true!), or that Chinese dialects are inferior to “proper” languages (definitely not!). A whole host of Indian languages are spoken here, including Malayalam, Hindi, Punjabi etc.  In fact, Indian children in the Singapore school system can choose to take Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi or Urdu instead of Tamil. Chinese dialects are great and they have vocabularies and grammatical structures are as rich and diverse as Mandarin.   

I learnt Japanese in school because I was interested in Japanese culture and art. I even started learning Arabic for fun!  Based on my personal experience, I think it is great to let your child learn other languages. My mother was somewhat concerned about letting me learn a third language before I was in my teens because she thought it would confuse me. I suppose she must also have viewed herself as confused because as mentioned, she was speaking at least four languages by the time she was 10.  When exposed to more than one language, your child might mix up some parts of languages here and there, but don’t worry! Very often, they are just piecing information together to figure out the patterns of each language. Their developing brains are hard at work!   

In our lab, we are currently running the Baby Talk-a-thon project for us to find out more about the diversity in language environments of Singaporean children. Perhaps like me growing up, your child is hearing a whole host of languages now from their different caregivers! If you’re interested to find out more, click here! 

Jin Yi is a Research Assistant at BLIP lab who is working on the language mixes project.