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 ;)