My name is Preeti. I am a Singaporean who has lived in Singapore and Australia. I come from the Telugu community, which is small in Singapore, and the language is not widely spoken. There are many Singaporean families who speak various Indian languages such as Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Kannada. However, not all these languages were available to study at school in the past. English is the main language of the school system, and I also learnt how to speak Tamil in my primary and secondary schools years. Tamil has always been my second language since then, and I enjoy speaking in Tamil with my friends and family. I regularly watch Tamil programs as they are shown daily on the Vasantham channel. One can also watch Tamil movies in the cinema, where English words and concepts also feature. Nowadays, there are more educational institutions to support diverse languages like Telugu.
Recently, I enrolled for a basic conversational Mandarin course at the Serangoon Community Centre for beginners. Learning Mandarin was challenging. Learning a new language was easier for me when I was young. When I am speaking in Tamil, my voice can go up and down without changing the meaning of a word, but this is different for Mandarin! The tones of Mandarin mean that if my voice goes up when it is meant to go down, I might accidentally say a completely different word! This means it was difficult to remember the exact sounds of the Chinese words.
Even so, Mandarin is very useful in Singapore. Once, an older auntie approached me at the MRT station – she needed help updating her travel card, but she only spoke Chinese. Luckily, I was able to help her, since I could speak some Mandarin. Even though it is hard to pick up another language as an adult, it is a nice feeling when my efforts allow me to help another person!
Preeti is a Research Associate in the BLIP Lab, working 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.