I was about this age in the picture when I referred to my mother as “she” in English. The exact words to my father were “What colour plate does she want to use?”. He shot me a strange, stern look and told me to “speak properly”. Puzzled, I wondered what was wrong with my sentence. Was it the grammar? Did I mispronounce something? My father saw the confusion on my face and he cleared it up for me. He explained to me that the way I asked was impolite to my mother. Now, that made me even more puzzled. Rather, what I was supposed to say was “What colour plate does Ibu want to use?” or “Ibu nak guna pinggan warna apa?”

At 6 years old then, I knew what pronouns were and how they worked in the English language. We both knew “she” referred to my mother, the only other female person in the house. Pronouns did not work the same way in Malay, though, the other language we used at home. It concerns hierarchy, social distance and formality. Unfortunately, my poor sweet father was unable to find the words to simplify these complex systems for a very young child. He did not know how to explain the concept of adapting pronoun use in English to accommodate its nuanced usage in Malay. I was already fluent in both Malay and English but had yet to learn the unique position occupied by many multilingual speakers – to navigate the cultures attached to these languages as their rules bleed into each other, in a household where both exist simultaneously.

The understanding came with time as I eavesdropped on more conversations between my family members among themselves and their friends. From these observations, I learnt the unspoken rules that govern English-Malay bilingualism – illeism, modified syntax, and other things I have yet to place the name to the concept.

I finally understood how my father felt when my 5-year-old cousin pointed at me, squarely in the face, and said to his brother, “I don’t want her to come to our house” as I shovelled away the walking hazard of Lego bricks he scattered on the kitchen floor in his little game. His teenage brother looked at him horrified, “That’s not nice! Why do you not want Kakak to come to our house?”

I was not upset, but rather amused at how the passage of time has gone full circle as another young and confused child is introduced to the intricacies of multilingualism.

This post was written by our intern, Irdina. Irdina is a 3rd Year student majoring in English Literature and speaks English and Malay.

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. 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/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!

“So what languages do you know?”

“Well, that’s a bit complicated…”

If I were to describe my language background, it would be something along the lines of “wannabe polyglot” and “terminally online cosmopolitan”. A polyglot refers to someone proficient in multiple languages — though polyglots would say that you would be considered a polyglot when you reach “proficiency” in four or five. By some definitions, I would be considered a polyglot: I can write and read English, Portuguese, Spanish, German and Swedish. But by some other definitions, I wouldn’t be considered a polyglot — I can only listen to English, Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese fluently, but I can’t listen to or speak the other languages I’ve listed very well. The idea of language proficiency is messy, and defining it is something that I’ve always stepped away from because, frankly, it’s just much clearer to say what you can or cannot do. I would prefer to look at it from the perspective of being able to use a language in the way that you want to use it.

My family background wasn’t anything ordinary for a Singaporean — I was born to a Malaysian Chinese mother and a Singaporean Chinese father, and my mother has always communicated in a mix of English and Mandarin Chinese to me. While she was fluent in Malay, she has never mentioned a single word of Malay to me until when I was about 20, when I got interested in learning languages. A pretty late age for new languages, but not the end of the world. 

I started learning languages as an adult through a combination of textbooks, programs like Duolingo and Anki, and some exposure to pop culture in that language if possible. It’s been a good five or six years of daily practice, and it’s clear that I haven’t been as successful in picking up languages as I wanted to be, but it’s an ongoing process of improvement. 

But the main reason I picked up languages in the first place is less for the love of the languages themselves, and more to communicate with friends that I’ve met online. While most of my friends online are comfortable with English, some of them have said that they felt most at home with their native language, or at least a combination of their native language and English. I got closer to my German friends when I started talking to them in the tongues that they felt most comfortable with, and we found ourselves laughing and talking to each other way more than we used to in doing so. The same went for my Brazilian friends who were speaking Portuguese, we would drop a random reference to a Brazilian meme and we’d laugh in both English and Portuguese lingo. And it was cool to see how our circle of friends were rotating between English and Portuguese without even thinking about it. Actual translanguaging!

I could go on about how much languages have helped me connect with people I’ve met all around the world, but the main point is that learning languages to deepen my online friendships with people from other countries has been both entertaining and fulfilling for me. I do hope to learn more languages one day for both social purposes and for my future studies (one of the routes I wanted to pursue as a PhD is in Japanese cultural studies and I don’t have much experience in Japanese), but language learning, especially as an adult, is a long arduous process. But I find it rewarding, both to experience all of the unique linguistic phenomena of using multiple languages like thinking about a concept differently, and to communicate with peers that I’ve never seen their “full” selves.

Perhaps it’d be fun for you too to pick up a new language too, whether it’d be to connect back to your roots or to connect with friends who speak a specific language that you don’t! It’s never too late to learn a language if you keep your expectations low and keep at it for a long time. Learning, like many things in life, is never a sprint; it’s a marathon.

This post was written by our intern, Eze. Eze is a 4th year Psychology & Linguistics and Multilingual Studies student.

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. 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/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!

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/ 
 
We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there! 

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! 

Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash

Selamat Hari Raya! 

This year, my family celebrated the first day by visiting my grandmother’s house. I’ve been looking forward to some of my aunt’s best dishes – beef rendang, lontong, and ayam masak merah (chicken cooked in a fragrant, tomato-chilli gravy), and of course, kuih layang-layang, which was made from rolled filo pastry and then sprinkled with salt. As I was munching away and taking in the conversations around me, I couldn’t help but notice different patterns of translanguaging going on in the room across the four generations.

Translanguaging happens when we use two or more languages within or between sentences. Similar to code-switching, or switching between languages, it’s more like using my different languages at the same time. While this does happen quite frequently at home and in my social circles, what was going on under my grandmother’s roof on Hari Raya was a lot more interesting.

My nenek, or grandmother, moved to Singapore when she was a child, and could only understand Malay and very minimal English. Because of this, we usually talk to her in mostly Malay. With my makcik (aunt) and pakcik (uncle), I use both English and Malay, with more Malay than English, but among themselves, they use mostly Malay. With my cousins, I used more English than Malay. My cousins also use a mix of English and Malay, but mostly English, with their children. How is it possible for us to know how much of which language to use with each other? Why do we speak differently with each other? Is it socially driven? Is it a conscious process? Is it automatic?

These thoughts made me think about how two different languages are represented in our brain. Although what went on at my grandmother’s place is somewhat different from my own home’s linguistic background where there are only two generations, I’m keen to know how much mixing goes on around the young ones who are just starting to learn language. How much of each language can they pick up when we translanguage? Can they tell the difference between English and Malay? Can they distinguish between the two when used in a single sentence? What about translanguaging within a word such as interestingnya (where ‘nya’ is a Malay suffix that means ‘very’)? This tweet by a parent about the conversation with her daughter made me giggle (Upin Ipin is a popular Malay children’s cartoon):

This post was written by our Research Assistant, Shaza. Wishing everyone a joyful Hari Raya Aidilfitri~

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/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!

唐诗三百首 (‘300 Tang poems’ in Chinese) is what I recall reciting to the extended family every Saturday at Grandma’s house as a wee 3-year-old. Unfortunately, as the years went by, I could not perform on demand anymore, because rehearsal is needed to sustain memory traces, who knew (I only learnt that 20 years later in my undergraduate Psychology class). My mum believed that ‘Mandarin is difficult to learn, easy to master’ (and ‘English is easy to learn, difficult to master’) therefore she wanted to drill Mandarin into me first… via Chinese literary work. (But my dad is almost exclusively English-speaking so… I don’t know what his contribution was in my early years.) I also lived with Teochew-speaking paternal grandparents in my childhood years and visited my aforementioned Hokkien-speaking grandmother on Saturdays so I had plenty of exposure to the Chinese languages all around. English and Mandarin are definitely my primary languages; I am also a big speaker of and advocate for Singlish. I think I speak Hokkien better than Teochew, albeit apparently it’s Teochew-accented Hokkien, so that’s fun. My tip for speaking Teochew is – use Hokkien lexis, but gentler. It works… 70% of the time.

In university, I took Linguistics modules that described our Singaporean particles (or ‘discourse markers’, as we call it in the BLIP Lab) with such linguistic precision and flair; I also took a Psychology module called ‘Language and Cognitive Processes’ where I learnt that one was able to do research about the vibrant language environment in Singapore – and thus my research career was born. Studying nonword repetition, reading and spelling in both Mandarin and English in our local population is endlessly fascinating: all the different cross-linguistic characteristics showing up where you least expect them.

Doing my PhD in the UK made me really try to make sense of my identity. What does it mean to be speaking in any of the other languages I knew in a largely monolingual English-speaking crowd? Why can’t they understand lah and lor and why must I cater to their accents? It made me hold close the colourful languages I knew but was unable to share with many. Over the past few years, I also decided to learn Baba Malay, which was my late paternal grandmother’s heritage. Apa khabair? Lu sua makan belom? (How are you? Have you eaten?) I learnt that it was a healthy mix of Hokkien and Bahasa Melayu lexis (with some spelling differences), unsurprising as those were the roots of the people who mingled and formed the community. Again, its endangered status is making me hold the language closer to me – what will become of the language when its speakers are no longer around? Gek sim (Hokkien/Teochew for a kind of deep aching in the heart) leh.

Photo by Baba Malay.

To end on a lighter note, I am very excited to be burrowing deep into the transcription and translation of multilingual speech in Singapore! The vibrance, the vivaciousness (vivacity?), ooh!

This post was written by our newest Research Fellow Rui Qi! She is currently working on the language mixes project with the team. Besides English, Rui Qi speaks Mandarin and a little bit each of Hokkien, Teochew and Baba Malay.

At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!

Click here for more multilingual memories!

My mother is a second-generation Malaysian immigrant, while my father is a second-generation Javanese immigrant. Naturally, my first language is English. Growing up, my parents communicated with me in a mixture of English and Malay, with certain Javanese words peppered in for flavour. Even though my father speaks fluent Javanese, he is the last of his generation to do so, and the language skill further deteriorated with my generation, with my personal vocabulary bank of less than 50 words.

Said Javanese vocabulary bank includes important child-oriented words such as “bobok” (sleep/nap) and “lengket” (sweaty). Other words include numbers one to six, while the number five is lost to memory. The Malay language fared better in terms of personal retention, however. While my parents would primarily communicate with me in a mixture of English and Malay, my responses would only be in English.

Due to the linguistic imperialism that affects most of us growing up, my primary media consumption was a mix of British books and American shows and movies. While one would discount it as a small aspect of a child’s linguistic journey in comparison to direct communication with peers and family, as an introverted child, it apparently formed my primary language and inner voice.

Growing up, my day-care providers were my grandparents, with the aid of a domestic helper from Indonesia. My parents had hired the domestic helper in hopes that she would communicate with me in Bahasa, while my grandparents were instructed to only communicate with me in Malay. This was in hopes of strengthening my Malay skills, but that approach did not work out as planned, as I would still respond in English, in turn strengthening their English communication skills instead.

Entering primary school, I was exposed to formal Malay, otherwise referred to as Bahasa Baku, a method of formal Malay pronunciation devised from pronouncing words exactly as they were written. While many consider this form of Malay awkward and unnatural, it was much easier for me to digest and use, with the simplified one-letter-one-sound system. Through school, I was also exposed to other Malay children of my age, although we did still communicate mostly in English. My written Malay excelled, as although my productive vocabulary was stunted, my receptive vocabulary worked perfectly fine. From there, I simply answered questions in English in my mind, and translated them before writing them down.

Up until National Service, I was not properly exposed to a fully Malay speaking community. During NS, for the first time, I had to exercise my productive vocabulary in order to fit in. This improved it significantly, albeit in the colloquial version of the language. Thus, while I am technically proficient in both written and spoken Malay, I learned them both separately, the former in an English-tinged formal sense, and the latter in a more localised manner. From my travels, I have found that I am also technically proficient in spoken Bahasa Indonesia, due to the linguistic similarities of the two varieties.

This post was written by Wiranto, our #SGUnited Intern. Wiranto is a 2nd year Psychology and Linguistics student and speaks English and Malay.

At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

We all like to poke fun at the English language (well, at least I do), with no better exemplar being how ‘though’, ‘through’, ‘tough’, ‘thorough’ and ‘thought’ have somehow managed to possess different pronunciations,  without bearing the slightest similarities in meaning. For native speakers, the ability to distinguish between them comes relatively easy, but I can only imagine how hard it must be for English learners to remember the differences. This got me thinking about the quirks that every language inevitably possesses – and how I wish I had the plasticity of a 3-year-old to be able to naturally pick up these mental rules. So, here are some of the more interesting peculiarities among languages (that I know) that I have noticed.

Firstly, Mandarin versus Japanese. It’s well known that one of the Japanese scripts is kanji (漢字), which is more or less Mandarin Chinese “on steroids”, due to having two different types of pronunciations:  the Chinese way (音読み) and the Japanese way (訓読み). Despite this, most Chinese speakers will be able to guess the meaning of the majority of kanji, as they possess the same meaning. The ones that are different though, often lead to memorable learning points. For example, ‘勉強する’ means ‘to study’ in Japanese, but in Mandarin, ‘勉强’ means to force yourself, or be reluctant about something. It probably wasn’t an intentional difference, but I often thought this was the height of irony and a great inside joke. Another example would be ‘大丈夫’, which means ‘everything is fine’ in Japanese, but is incomprehensible in Mandarin (transliterated as ‘large husband’?). These little differences accumulate the more you learn a language, and is a fun way to keep you on your toes.

Then, there is the Russian language. As a beginner learner, there is no greater ‘quirk’ for me than the differences between the handwritten and printed forms. It is much more extreme than the cursive versus typed forms in English, since some letters have no visual similarity to one  another  at all (e.g., the ‘T’ in print form looks like an elaborate ‘m’ in cursive form). Additionally, writing in cursive is the default in Russian, and so it was one of the first steps I needed to take to become more comfortable with the language.

Picture on the right: One of our class exercises in a (technically improper) handwritten typed style, before we learnt how to write in cursive.

To me, each language is like a personality – it can be fun, but also frustrating, with a few (or many) idiosyncrasies thrown in for good measure. The things I pointed out were casual observations, and I am sure that there are many more exceptions and irregular rules that these languages have. So, what are some of the ‘quirks’ that the languages you know possess?

This post was written by Jieying, our #SGUnited Intern. Jieying is a 3rd year Psychology student and speaks English, Mandarin, Japanese, and a little Russian and Cantonese.

At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

I’ve been learning Korean for about 7-8 years now. I started off as a KPOP fan in the year of 2009 when Girl’s Generation and Wonder Girls were gaining popularity. Following that, I continued to keep up with my interest in Korean pop music by searching for the translation of lyrics  of songs I was listening to, just so that I could understand what I was hearing and  grasp the main message of the song(s). I started delving deeper into KPOP around 2014/15 when I was going through major life changes after a personal incident led me to re-evaluate how I perceive myself. Since I started off as a KPOP fan pretty early on in my life, I wanted to understand what I was listening to as I believe that what I feed my mind can manifest in my thoughts and actions. Song lyrics were the primary medium of Korean that I was exposed to and they included a mix of both formal and informal Korean.

I also watched Korean dramas, mostly mid-length series, spanning 12 to 20 episodes that air over a duration of roughly two months. In terms of the use of Korean language in K-dramas, it helps that the language is contextualised and applied to real-life situations or an imitation of real-life scenarios. Another form of Korean I was exposed to was tweets. Being a KPOP fan, it was not uncommon to follow my favourite KPOP artists on Twitter where they posted photos with captions in Korean or longer tweets written in Korean. Being on Twitter since 2014, which is about 8 years so roughly the same amount of time that I have been learning Korean, I have been exposed more regularly to Korean script than text in my mother tongue (Malay). As such, some Korean words were often more accessible than Malay words, likely due to the strength of association and frequency of use.

I am proud to say that I now know enough to understand – I can understand more than I speak due to my lack of foundation in the grammar aspect of Korean – as well as translate, which I would consider to be an advanced level of Korean. I am currently doing translations for a fanpage of The Boyz member Hyunjae, which involves translating his messages on a fan-focused application as well as interview responses, promotional content, etc.

In the future, I hope to get proper certification or a placement test to determine my proficiency level in the language. Currently, my Korean proficiency level is ambiguous as I am not sure if I should consider myself to be an advanced speaker because I lack basic training in the language. As language learners, it is important not to become complacent and instead, we should humble ourselves when learning a language as it does not come as easily for some people. Thankfully, learning languages comes quite naturally to me as long as I have the interest.

This post was written by Aqilah, our #SGUnited intern. Aqilah is a 3rd year Psychology student and speaks English, Malay, Korean, Spanish and Arabic.

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash

As the title suggests, my experience with languages has often been in waves. Perhaps to supplement this analogy further, a great example would be my experience with Japanese.

My household was filled with a variety of languages when I was younger: from Hokkien to English, Teochew to Mandarin. I was able to pick these languages up almost instantly with the intent to eavesdrop on adult conversations, or to even show that I was exceeding expectations as a child. However, my true interest lies with the Japanese language. It started from my experiences at sushi restaurants and watching child-friendly animations; I started self-learning this language with one of the language-learning compact discs you get from bookshops. While I managed to learn quite a bit of the language to make some sense of episodes of Doraemon without subtitles, the lack of usage among my family members hindered my ability to practise using the language daily. From my language environment, I picked up cuss words in Hokkien more quickly than the color names in Japanese.

My first wave of interest  in Japanese waned when school started getting busy. Of course, the lack of interest in the language or even the culture within my social groups in school hindered this learning further. As such, I lost almost all my grammatical and vocabulary knowledge by the time I was 15, though I remember quite vividly that I still remembered the numbers 1-10 and rapped it before my oral examinations as warm-up.

My second wave was fleeting when I was 16-17, when Murakami started being a little bit more popular on Tumblr and other book-reading communities. Of course, while I was not up to reading an entire book in Japanese (note: I’m not even n5 certified), I went back to watching animation and realized I had lost any form of understanding. While I was not surprised, it was definitely a pity to my younger self. Nonetheless, relying on my latent memories, I was able to pick some of those back up, though this proved to be futile when the wave ended a few months later.

Me, in 2017, living my best self in Osaka.

The most recent wave started when I started taking up lessons again in university. Of course, I still succeeded (quite well) in reciting numbers, though it became difficult and somewhat nostalgic when I started on the vocabulary. My social groups were more inclined to engaging in the culture , which inspired me to also engage more in Japanese content, further supporting  my learning of the language.  I hope this current wave doesn’t crash anytime soon, as there is still much more to learn.

This post was written by Cameron, our #SGUnited Intern. Cameron is a 4th year Psychology student and speaks English, Mandarin, and Japanese.

At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!

Born to immigrant parents from China but growing up in Singapore meant that I am effectively bilingual, and as a child, the language I used was highly context dependent. If I was at home, I spoke Mandarin Chinese casually; if I was in school with my Singaporean peers, I spoke primarily in English and a “modified form” of my usual Mandarin. Translanguaging to me is intricately linked to my relationship with my identity, and as a kid I so desperately wanted to be a part of the in-group, the “true-blue” local Singaporeans.

Language is a signifier of identity and belonging. If you spoke a different variety, you may be treated differently. I was very conscious of this as a child and did everything I could to mask my foreign accented Mandarin. As a primary schooler, I monitored how I spoke Mandarin Chinese in public, changing how I pronounced retroflex sounds. An example I can think of is “二” (pronounced as “eer”), Mandarin for the number two. In public, I never rolled my tongue when pronouncing the “r” if I could help it as Singaporean speakers tend not to – and this was one of many strategies I employed to fit in. English on the other hand was my safety language because I spoke a similar English variety as  my peers, or at least an English that did not reflect my mainland Chinese roots. I struggled with reconciling the natural language that I shared with my family, and the local identity that I wanted to construct for myself.

In my teen years, I had a brief rendezvous with French, studying it for a brief two years. Now the only French I speak is censored. I also learned the Sichuanese dialect, a variant of Mandarin. Sichuanese, or Sichuanhua is the only language my paternal grandmother, or 奶奶 (nai-nai), speaks, and to communicate with her I had to understand it. Like my mother, I can understand Sichuanhua but speak it  poorly. Both of my parents are from the Sichuan province, a Southern part of China, and Sichuanhua is the language we use exclusively when communicating with relatives. My father is adept at switching into it when speaking to his cousins and back into Putonghua (the official variety of Chinese Mandarin in China) when talking to me and my mother. Thus, Sichuanhua is both familial and foreign to me, being a language spoken by my family but not one I can readily use. Perhaps an interesting side note is that I address my maternal grandmother as 姥姥, lao-lao, and my maternal grandfather as 姥爷, lao-ye. This is because my maternal grandmother is a Northern girl through and through and she wears the pants in the family (rightfully so). These terms are not commonly used in the Mandarin spoken here in Singapore.

As cliché as it sounds, I now love the languages that I speak. Maybe there will never quite be a label that’s a perfect fit for my identity, but that’s fine. To me, speaking and living a language comes with an appreciation of its culture and people, and that is a beautiful experience.

This post was written by Shifan, our #SGUnited intern. Shifan is a 3rd year Psychology major and speaks English and Mandarin Chinese.

At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!

Click here to read more of our Multilingual Memories!