Bilingualism in my family part 2

(continued)...


Marriage is also a factor to be bilingual (and/or multilingual) in both my dad and mum's families. On my paternal side, my dad has a sister-in-law who originates from Singapore and a brother-in-law who is a convert from Iban family while from my maternal side, my mother has a brother married to an Indonesian woman. These addition to our family brings along their mother tongue language into effect (although not imposing on us to be good at Singapore Malay, Iban and Indonesian respectively) but we have the advantage to learn too! So for these aunties and uncles of mine, being bilingual or multi is expected when they married into a family who does not speak their born language. Occasionally, we tend to be influenced by the accent and tone of speech whenever these individuals converse with us e.g. my Singaporean auntie will have this sentence to ask "Alaaa...kenapa lambat? Tadi siapa drive? Bapak atau Huzairie?" - "Why so late? Who was driving? Your father or Huzairie?" This may look typical of any Brunei Malay conversation but it sounds different because my auntie has her own Singaporean accent and I admit, my sisters and I especially often find ourselves speaking in slight Singapore Malay accent too! 


With knowledge and acquisition in both Malay (Standard, Brunei and Sarawak) as well as English, this has also affected our communication in the virtual world aka Facebook, Twitter and SMS. As many other families out there, mine is not excluded from doing code-switching in the mentioned medium of communication. Mass media also helped in the mastering of other foreign languages such as Tagalog, Hindi, Korean and Cantonese to name a few and interestingly, I can communicate with my family in these languages! Not 100% fluent but on the acceptable level. 


I guess I should stop here before I bore you with more of my story on my family and our use of bili/multilingualism. Hope there are some academic values in the posts I am sharing (: Will try to improve as the time goes by!




Love Love Love
Zyra A.  


        


   

Bilingualism in my family part 1

Assalamualaikum WBT (: Morning people of earth! (draft on Thursday January 19th)

My first post was not so catchy I should say, so hope this time will be better. We are in ICTC Lab having just finished a lecture by our very own Dr. Gary Jones and he gave us outlines on what our presentations should be. One of the options excites me: bilingualism in your immediate family and this could just be my choice.

Coming from big families on both my paternal and maternal sides, and with myself having inherited Sarawak-Malay and Brunei-Malay blood (my dad's side and my mother's side respectively), being bilingual is already in the book way before I was born. Taking a simple definition of bilingualism, it can be referred to as the ability to speak in two languages. Well of course, the whole concept of bilingualism cannot be as simple as that but I won't go into that. My insight for this post circulates around my family and how the use of bilingualism comes to be in usage. 

My paternal grandfather was a teacher and this is no surprise with his children eventually following his steps in becoming education officers. Including my dad, 3 of his siblings are teachers and so do his sister-in-law and brother-in-law. Interestingly, my dad's sisters are both Maths teachers; his sister-in-law is a Religious Teacher; his brother-in-law a Malay teacher and my dad himself an English teacher. So as can be seen, different medium of teaching is used - English for Maths and English subjects; Bahasa Melayu for Malay and a mixture of Bahasa Melayu and Arabic for religious teaching. Already my dad, his siblings and in-laws have to master those mentioned teaching mediums to communicate and interact for their profession reason: this has not include the common language that they speak in among my dad's family members and that is Bahasa Sarawak. 

If you consider Bahasa Sarawak to be a distinct language from Bahasa Melayu, almost everyone in my paternal family is then, bilingual. Added to English as the third medium of communication, that makes us multilingual even! Bahasa Sarawak is unique with its own tone, pronunciation and terms to name a few and compared to Bahasa Melayu, I personally find it hard to be involved in my family's conversations whenever they communicate in the former. Often, I reply to my grandmother in Brunei Malay in response to her questions in Bahasa Sarawak and I get laughed at for not able to master my ancestors' heritage! Well I can speak and understand the basic terms and sentences, but to get to the fluency level is yet for me to achieve. People say learning takes time and I am taking my very own sweet time on this one ;) 

 

Facebook, Twitter and now a blog?

Assalamualaikum and evening all (:

For someone who is not that good in this whole online thing, I should (and can) consider myself as an achiever for reaching this far. Hmm don't get it? I don't either! :p Kidding! 

See, I view myself as a girl who is not that good in computer/online thingy and when Facebook first started, I was not as excited as some others! Then one day, I suddenly have my own Facebook account (I was forced to!); then signing up for Twitter (forced too!) and now a blog! (well, if my lecturer is reading this I'm not sure if I should say I'm forc...no, I'd rather say I'm obliged to) (: To say that I am ecstatic having to create and produce a blog is a lie; but I wouldn't mind learning another new thing in life. Life is all about learning, isn't it?  So here goes! 

The content may bore you, so apologies in advance. But I know there are only a number of you who can relate to the coming posts I will be sharing. And to those I say, one final semester beloveds :') 

Toodles! 

Love Love Love

Zyra A.