I grew up speaking in three languages; English, Malay and Hokkien. I suppose technically, although I speak and think in English, Hokkien is considered my mother tongue.
There is an interesting history to this however (as my Ma told me before). As I had mentioned previously, when I was much younger, I was taken care of by a babysitter who happened to be Cantonese (but spoke Hokkien too). Perhaps because my Ma speaks Cantonese too, she taught us to speak in the same dialect. According to my Ma, that was the first language I ever learnt to speak. However, this posed some serious problems for my Pa who spoke no Cantonese. You get my drift…
Sometimes, I feel it’s a shame that I had not continued to learn the dialect. Whenever I hear it spoken now, it brings me back to childhood memories when I used to run up and down in my babysitter’s home (which became a second home to me) and also of my Poh Poh’s home (which later became my second home). My attempts to speak it now just causes laughter followed by, “you speak like a foreigner!”
In my family, we speak a jumble of English and Hokkien. For me, I would say about 80% of it is English. Whenever I try to attempt speaking in Hokkien, my mind stalls abit and I have to keep trying to remember what the particular word is I am looking for. It just makes it easier (and faster) to speak in English with a few Hokkien words thrown in for good measure…you know, just to blend in abit. It is the same as Malay for me now.
When I was back home 2 years ago, my ex met me there. As he looked full blown tourist with neon signs on his forehead, I had to attempt speaking in Malay in various situations just to try not to get ripped off. It did not work very well, however, as it seemed I looked like a tourist too (I stand my ground by claiming it was by association). It made me realise that 11 years of studying that darn language does actually come back to you in bits and pieces when you try hard enough.
Hokkien, on the other hand, comes abit harder. We were never taught the dialect officially (like in classes, tests, exams etc). My parents taught us to speak it since we were young and that was it. We never knew how to read it. In fact, I never knew we could read it from Chinese characters. I still have no idea. Today, if we did want to write it out, we just do it phonetically which sounds quite hilarious. Sometimes, I have to read it out loud to figure out what the sentence is – sometimes, reading it twice. When I finally get it, it just cracks me up.
I very rarely speak Hokkien to my friends. The only people I would speak it to are my family and my best friend in the US. Since moving here, I have spoken it more frequently with friends but more so out of disguise when bitching about certain people in front of us who in no way (we hope) understands the dialect. Sometimes, for the sake of variety, we use Malay too.
My sisters and I have been told that some of the words we use are not familiar to other people. This was when we realised, perhaps due to the lack of communication with outsiders in this dialect, we have actually managed to come up with our own ‘hokkien’ words. The funny thing is, we totally understand each other. Again, I blame it on our parents. When they were teaching us, they probably never bothered to correct us and thus, we grew up thinking that particular word existed when it doesn’t. In Chinese dialects, a change in intonation or just a single phonetic letter can change the entire meaning of a word.
I have a feeling my Hokkien’s just gonna get worse the longer I live here. Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to bitch more at people talk more to my friends to practice!
