Adrianna Tan
My parents *only* speak Hokkien / Taiwanese to each other, but they speak to me in Mandarin / Hokkien / English.
It would be weird to switch languages. I have cousins I speak certain languages to but not others, even if we are all proficient in something else as well. It just feels.. weird.
I never figured out why or how this sort of language rigidity starts or how it’s even established or maintained.
Adrianna Tan
A really funny moment was when my parents arrived in San Francisco and I told my next door Vietnamese neighbor that they were here. She immediately came over and they stood at the door greeting each other in Teochew and Cantonese literally shouting lunar new year greetings at each other for five minutes
Adrianna Tan
@h4sh many Vietnamese people in California and also in France are Vietnamese Chinese. They would most definitely know at least one. Most Vietnamese Teochews know Vietnamese, Teochew and Cantonese. Most Vietnamese Cantonese know Vietnamese and Cantonese.
h4sh
@skinnylatte Do a lot of vietnamese people know Teochew or Cantonese?
Adrianna Tan
Also, when I speak English to them, I have a completely different accent. My sentence structure also gets shorter, and I move things around a lot to the extent that you might not even know I was speaking English.
It’s not singlish as such (that’s its own thing and I only do that in another context. Like in a taxi or hawker center in Singapore). Singlish also has its own grammar and rules.
According to this article about Singapore English there is acrolectal English, mesolectal and basilectal (in decreasing status and prestige). I guess I feel I can switch effortlessly between the entire spectrum of it. “ The acrolect is the most prestigious, spoken by highly educated Singaporeans. Acrolectal Singapore English is very close to Standard British English in terms of its grammatical structure”
With my parents I most definitely unconsciously aim for the mesolectal. They wouldn’t understand me at all in my American English or acrolectal English which is my English accent of choice at the workplace there.
Ruby Pan’s video from 17 years ago demonstrates the range
Adrianna Tan
Interesting quote from the same Cambridge link: in a newspaper article about language in Singapore in 1937, a British writer wrote “ There is, we believe, no record of the number of tongues spoken at the original Babel but we have an idea that if the truth were shown Singapore would be found to have put its ancient prototype into the shade’.” (He believed the challenge in reaching English proficiency was because we spoke way too many other languages.) I quite like that quite out of context, though I see the multilingualism as a strength, and our variety of English types as an interesting quirk as well.
I do worry that decades of language repression in favor of prestige languages (Mandarin over dialects, the ‘right’ English accent versus our natural ones), have killed a lot of language variety. And proficiency.
Adrianna Tan
@onekind LOLLL
Daniel Reeders
@skinnylatte ok this is Jenny Tian, great comedian who speaks Ocker (basilectal Australian) with a super broad accent https://youtu.be/pd7-zJEFNQI?t=189
Adrianna Tan
@onekind this guy makes my head break
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