Hi, I’m Kathleen. I spent the first 18 years of my life in Singapore. One of the things I really enjoy about growing up and living in Singapore is the multicultural and in turn, multilingual environment we are exposed to. I lived in a Mandarin-speaking household, with parents and relatives who also speak to each other in English and Teochew (a Chinese dialect). My grandmother on my mother’s side spoke Hokkien (another Chinese dialect). My neighbours spoke Malay, and I had classmates who spoke Tamil.

With all these diverse experiences, I found I adapted very easily to new cultures. I have lived and worked in Australia, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom. As you live and work alongside people from different cultures, it is easy to pick up languages from them. I find that when I use a person’s language to communicate with them, I can build a better rapport. So now, I can order food in German, know the word for “funnel” in Spanish (!), swear (just a little) in Polish (!@#^!), encourage a child in Japanese (^__^), and sing baby songs in Italian (👶🎶).

What skills do you have in your different languages?

***

Kathleen one of BLIP Lab’s longest established team members – she’s supporting research on the Singapore Talk-a-thon as part of the Language-Mixes Project

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.