#Malay English and Mandarin

[gomzdrawfr]

Sometimes im reminded that Malaysian tend to have like the habit of switching up languages with no big issues and forgot that not everyone can do that

I went to the local food market, the type that is out in the open with several stalls all placed together closely and its crowded and stuff right

So I talk to my brother and sister in English, Mandarin + Cantonese to my mom and dad. If we're ordering food from the aunty uncle, we either use hokkien / fujian or Malay (depending the race of the seller)

There was a neighbouring customer who were white(think they were from America judging from the bag and general mannerism) that started talking to my dad and he was just saying how insane we sounded switching languages around HAHA

[gwendolynlerman]

Most commonly spoken language in each country

I had to separate the legend from the map because it would not have been legible otherwise. I am aware that the color distinctions are not always very clear, but there are only so many colors in the palette.

The legend is arranged in alphabetical order and languages are grouped by family (bullet points), with branches represented by numbers and followed by the color palette languages within them are colored in, as follows:

Afroasiatic

Chadic (Hausa) — ocher

Cushitic (Oromo and Somali) — light yellow-green

Semitic (from Arabic to Tigrinya) — yellow

Albanian — olive green

Armenian — mauve

Atlantic-Congo

Benue-Congo (from Chewa to Zulu) — blue-green

Senegambian (Fula and Wolof) — faded blue-green

Volta-Congo (Ewe and Mooré) — bright blue-green

Austroasiatic (Khmer and Vietnamese) — dark blue-purple

Austronesian

Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (from Fijian to Wallisian) — dark brown

Malayo-Polynesian (Palauan) — bright brown

Western Malayo-Polynesian (from Malagasy to Tagalog) — light brown

Eastern Sudanic (Dinka) — foral white

Hellenic (Greek) — black

Indo-European

Germanic (from Danish to Swedish) — light blue (creoles in medium/dark blue)

English-based creoles (from Antiguan and Barbudan to Vincentian Creole)

Indo-Aryan (from Bengali to Sinhala) — purple

Iranian (Persian) — gray

Romance (from Catalan to Spanish) — red (creoles in dark red)

French-based creoles (from Haitian Creole to Seychellois Creole)

Portuguese-based creoles (from Cape Verdean Creole to Papiamento)

Slavic — light green (from Bulgarian to Ukrainian)

Inuit (Greenlandic) — white

Japonic (Japanese) — blanched almond

Kartvelian (Georgian) — faded blue

Koreanic (Korean) — yellow-orange

Kra-Dai (Lao and Thai) — dark orange

Mande (from Bambara to Mandinka) — magenta/violet

Mongolic (Mongolian) — red-brown

Sino-Tibetan (Burmese, Chinese*, and Dzongkha) — pink

Turkic (from Azerbaijani to Uzbek) — dark green

Uralic

Balto-Finnic (Estonian and Finnish) — light orange

Ugric (Hungarian) — salmon

* Chinese refers to Cantonese and Mandarin. Hindi and Urdu are grouped under Hindustani, and Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are grouped under Serbo-Croatian.

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting

Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish, which arose from this highly multilingual environment to create something unique to the island. An important part of growing up in Singapore is learning which of your language skills to use in which situation.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn language in Singapore with Woon Fei Ting, who’s a Research Associate and the Lab Manager at the Brain, Language & Intersensory Perception Lab at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. We talk about how the rich multilingual environment in Singapore led Fei Ting and the lab to do language documentation while trying to figure out how kids learn to talk in Singapore, creating a dictionary of Red Dot Baby Talk (named after how Singapore looks like a red dot on the world map). We also talk about Singlish more generally, some words that Gretchen has learned on her trip, doing research with kids and parents via Zoom, and the role of a lab manager and other lab members in doing linguistic research.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements: Our liveshow is in just a few days!! Gretchen will be chatting to Dr Kirby Conrod (from our episode about the grammar of singular they) about language and gender on February 18th (Canada) slash 19th (Australia)! You can find out what time that is for you here. This liveshow is for Lingthusiam patrons and will take place on the Lingthusiasm Discord server. Become a patron before the event to ask us questions in advance or live-react in the text chat. This episode will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: ask us questions about gender or tell us about your favourite examples of gender in various languages and we might include them in the show!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about what we've been up to in 2022 and what's coming up for 2023. We also talk about our favourite linguistics paper that we read in 2022 slash possibly ever: okay, yes, academic papers don’t typically do this, but this paper has spoilers, so we STRONGLY recommend reading it yourself here before listening to this episode, or check out the sample paragraph on the Patreon post. Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds, and get access to this weekends liveshow!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Woon Fei Ting on Twitter

Lingthusiasm episode ‘What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles’, the prof whose lab Fei Ting works in

BLIP lab at NTU on Facebook

‘Creating a Corpus of Multilingual Parent-Child Speech Remotely: Lessons Learned in a Large-Scale Onscreen Picturebook Sharing Task’ by Woon Fei Ting et al

BLIP lab’s transcription protocol and FAQ

‘Little Orangutan: What a Scary Storm!’ Wordless picture book by Suzy Styles

‘Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to how Singaporeans communicate’ by Gwee Li Sui

Lingthusiasm episode ‘Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[caw4brandon]

Anis x Sadie: Bilingual Humor

Anis: Hey Sadie, you're smart right? How do you say Corn in Cantonese?

Sadie: Corn...粟米? (Suk Mai)

Anis: ha-ha! Suk Mai nuts!!! 

Sadie: [...] I'm gonna disown you~

[Reference Here]

This is purely just for laughs, just Anis being cheeky.

Anis is Bilingual. She is fluent in, Malay and English. She knows a little bit of Mandarin and Cantonese. Mostly by watching and learning from Bad Chinese and Hong Kong Dramas. Perks of a bilingual. The jokes transcend pass one language.

[qqtxt]

Haha, I got a tattoo of a dandelion on my right hip to remind myself that I'm strong and I matter. It's a little small though. I didn't really think about it. I'm probably going to add my flowers there since the hip canvas is so large.

I originally wanted to dye certain strands of hair different colors of the rainbow, but the lady got it wrong and dyed my whole head and bleached only once (I have black hair), so it looks like a late desert sunset, which I can't be too mad about if I can describe it like that.

Living with my boyfriend felt pretty natural, despite almost have never lived with any males on the house. But we're both introverts and we survived quarantine together which is good haha.

I'm glad you're heading towards your masters! Taking those freelance jobs are so important for you to add onto your resume. I'm trying to switch careers but it's hard with very little experience to my chosen career.

Oh yeah! I do rmbr you saying something about Hokkien. I still think it's funny for you to choose that language since it's not as common. And why Mandarin? Do you have a lot of clients or people around you that speak that too?

ahhh so interesting!!! i'm so glad to hear all of that, all that self-love, and surviving quarantine with your partner generally is a good thing, haha! (love love love the dandelion tattoo meaning and the potential expansion!!!)

haha! funny but not so funny is that hokkien is my mother tongue; the dialect of my family because we're hokkien! it's just that i never got around to learning it when i was younger bc i was already juggling with three languages as a child, so it never came through. the same with mandarin but bc my bf's grandma only speaks either mandarin or cantonese, so I'm trying to learn mandarin to speak to her better! i guess there were a lot of reasons for me to learn, but there's also a lot of reasons why i didn't learn but potato-potata, we're here now!

all love to you, smiles! glad to hear from you hehe <3

[melonymint753]

think I jumped right into overexplaining in the tags so the short answer is, depending on how you count it, between 3-9:

English (?), Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, French, German, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish

*for non americans, that’s what you attend between the ages ~11-14 btw

[landarahzza]

ig : supershelhiel

[illuminaryart]

No Greater Love. 16x20 watercolor and ink. Each "I love you" was written by a native speaker or student of that language. Afrikaans, American Sign Language, Arabic, Bijabo, Burmese, Czech,  Danish, Dutch,  English, Faroese, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Greek (koine), Greek (modern), Gujarati, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Ilakano, Indonesian,  Italian, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Kreyal, Kriol, Latin, Latvian,  Lingala, Luganda, Malay,  Malay, Mandarin,  Melpa, Mongolian, Nakui, Nepali, Papua New Guinean Pidgin (three versions), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian,  Runyankore, Russian, Samoan,  Sesotho, Slovak,  Sorimi, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil,  Tedim, Thai, Tohono O’odham, Tongan, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu.

[edenesth]

About Me✨

Omg, I still cannot believe I now have more than 2k followers!😭

Thank you all so much!💖 Not sure if anyone cares enough about this but I've decided to do a proper self-introduction and face reveal that absolutely nobody asked for HAHA

Now, I don't want to shove this info down everyone's throats, obviously! So, only click to read more if you're genuinely interested in getting to know me better!🙆🏻‍♀️

If you're reading this, I LOVE YOU🥺

Hey, lovelies! My name's Lee Angie, and believe it or not, that's literally my full name HAHA it's kinda like Kang Daniel's name.

I was born on the 9th of September, 1997. If you're my birthday twin or a fellow 97 liner, holler at me!👋🏻

If you're wondering about my ethnicity/nationality, I'm Chinese Malaysian, like the actress Michelle Yeoh. In case you're curious about where I'm from, do check out Crazy Rich Asians because a huge chunk of the movie was filmed in Malaysia (speaking of which, Henry Golding is Malaysian too!).

I'm multilingual and can speak up to four languages; English, Malay, Mandarin, and Cantonese. I've also been actively learning Korean for years, if Duolingo lessons count🤣

When I say I'm a multifan, that's not limited to different K-pop groups. I'm a fan of many things like Harry Potter, Star Wars, most things Marvel, shows like Bridgerton, K-dramas, C-dramas, anime, gaming, and the list goes onnnnn. I'm a sucker for nearly anything in the fantasy genre.

I think that's about it🤔

And last but not least, this is meee🙈

Fun fact: I've been told I look like the Korean actresses Jun Jihyun and Song Hyekyo, and more recently, some people say I look like the older version of NewJeans' Danielle. What do you think?🤭

If you've made it this far, thank you! Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions for me! I'd love to get to know you too!💜💜💜

❀࿐　　⁺　.　　get 2 know your fav blogs!

[gomzdrawfr]

OI YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSE TO EXPOSE ME LIKE THI- yeah

Price is also, a menace when he wants to be

[atthebell]

Updated QSMP AO3 Work Language Stats-- as of April 1st, 2024 (no, this is not an april fools' joke)

June 6 2023 stats, July 9 2023 stats, August 13 2023 stats, December 3 2023 stats

Hello! I meant to get this done around the year anniversary of the server, but that ultimately didn't end up happening, so we have it now about a week late-- considering the growth rate for the fandom, this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Before we get into it, I want to say that the last year of QSMP fandom has been amazing. There's been a lot to deal with, but there's also been plenty of amazing fanworks, and I really do want to celebrate that along with the multilingual nature of the fandom.

Fun tidbits/disclaimers to start:

QSMP has 8739 works as of today!! That's about 6x as many works as it had in June of 2023, when I started doing these stats.

AO3 has 12,750,000 total works as of today (this is a rough estimate that displays on the front page when you're logged out, not an exact number).

There's a few more languages since my last update, including new languages on the server!

I've mentioned my methodology on previous stats posts, but just as a reminder, I gather this data manually by filtering by language within the QSMP tag. On occasion I miss a new language, but on the whole the significant numbers should be accurate.

QSMP Numbers:

[Image Description: A table with three columns; the first lists languages, the second the number of works, and the third the percentage of total works. For the languages column, each language is listed first in that language and then in English in parentheses, and English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Korean, and German are all color-coded to indicate that they are spoken on the server. End ID.]

English has 7305 works and 83.71% of total works in QSMP.

Spanish has 893 works and 10.22% of total works.

Brazilian Portuguese has 452 works and 5.17% of total works.

French has 47 works and 0.54% of total works.

Korean has 0 works and 0% of total works.

German has 2 works and 0.02% of total works.

Russian has 7 works and 0.08% of total works.

European Portuguese has 5 works and 0.06% of total works.

Mandarin has 4 works and 0.05% of total works.

Polish has 2 works and 0.02% of total works.

The last nine languages, Latin, Esperanto, Malaysian Malay, Filipino, Vietnamese, Turkish, Danish, Finnish, and Swedish, all have 1 work and 0.01% of total works respectively.

Observations:

English has maintained 80% or above for the last year; the current percentage (83.71%) is the highest it's been at that I've observed. Spanish has been at a slight decline since the start of the server, with its high happening in June (again, from my observations) at 17.73% and the current percentage (10.22%) being the lowest. This could be attributed in part to a steady decrease of active Spanish speaking members over the course of the server but I wouldn't want to assign causation. Brazilian Portuguese works have stayed around 5% since December, French is at 0.5%. Korean is at 0, which isn't surprising to me; Korean has low numbers on AO3, and I assume most Korean speakers use other fanfiction websites. German is at 2 works, which I believe have been there for a bit (as in, since before Hugo was added).

European Portuguese obviously makes sense to be on here, as do Russian and Chinese (two of the most used languages on AO3 aside from English), and their numbers don't surprise me-- they haven't changed much over the course of the server's history. The other one-work languages are interesting, and to me demonstrate the growth of the server & fandom along with the way the fandom incentivizes and encourages creating fanworks in one's native language(s).

AO3 Numbers Across the Site:

[Image Description: The same table as above, with AO3's site-wide stats inserted into the latter two columns. End ID.]

To repeat, AO3 has 12,750,000 total works across the site as of today.

English has 11,180,000 works and 87.69% of total works in QSMP.

Spanish has 154,900 works and 1.21% of total works.

Brazilian Portuguese has 35,980 works and 0.28% of total works.

French has 61,620 works and 0.48% of total works.

Korean has 2,957 works and 0.02% of total works.

German has 26,170 works and 0.21% of total works.

Russian has 266,200 works and 2.09% of total works.

European Portuguese has 1,150 works and 0.01 % of total works.

Mandarin has 766,200 works and 6.01% of total works.

Polish has 18,270 works and 0.14% of total works.

Latin, Esperanto, Malaysian Malay, and Danish have 95, 125, 116, and 344 works respectively and 0.00% of total works.

Filipino has 9,665 works and 0.08% of total works.

Vietnamese has 8,354 works and 0.07% of total works.

Turkish has 3,400 works and 0.03% of total works.

Finnish has 2386 works and 0.02% of total works.

Swedish has 1,039 works and 0.01% of total works.

All these numbers come from AO3's Languages page.

Observations:

The only changes I see here from June that I find interesting are that English has gone down over a percentage since last year-- I'm not a statistician, so I'm not sure if it's a super significant amount of change, but since English is by far the most tagged language on the site, I think any notable change is interesting. Mandarin is up slightly, but again, I'm not sure how to go about measuring what is a significant amount of change. Otherwise there's not a ton of changes I've seen over the last year, at least not in regards to the languages I've been tracking.

QSMP Changes Since June 2023:

[Image Descriptions: Two tables like the ones above; one is the QSMP numbers from June, as linked at the top of the post. One is the QSMP numbers for this month, as displayed above. End ID.

Biggest thing of note here is just the amount of languages-- we've gone from eight tagged languages to 19 tagged languages, more than doubling the number of languages from June. Super impressive! I hope we continue to see more and more languages used in fanworks.

Brief personal opinions time

In previous stats posts, I talked about reasons as to why these languages break down like this and what makes people interested in various characters. I think those points are all still pretty true, particularly the ones about interest in certain characters because of roleplay skill and centrality to the narrative, along with the usual reasons people like certain MCRP characters (hot creator, existing fondness from prior series, etc.) but I think the ways the server has changed and the characters people have latched onto as time has gone on have shifted somewhat, which is interesting to me.

This is less related to AO3 numbers and more the general fandom, but it's interesting to me to experience the fandom on Tumblr, Twitter, and AO3, where the language usages and focus on certain characters differs so much across platforms. We've all talked about this before, but the lack of an autotranslation feature on here really prevents a lot of multilingualism, whereas I've noticed a decent amount of people reading fic in various languages, probably bc the level of interactivity is very different on AO3 versus here.

If I have any more interesting analysis/theories/opinions/etc. I'll rb with those.

Final disclaimers:

Fics often get deleted from the archive for a myriad of reasons, and in the last several months there have been a lot of things that could and have led to works being deleted. This means both the growth rate for the fandom (which I'm not numerically tracking but do keep an eye on more casually) as well as these specific stats are impacted by these deletions. Not to get on my soapbox, but as someone who finds fandom history and archiving really important, I want to encourage people to orphan works rather than delete them. Here is the AO3 FAQ section on orphaning.

Languages are manually tagged by users; they are not double checked by the archive nor by me (I am not looking through almost nine thousand fics to check if the language tagged is actually accurate). Sometimes people tag the wrong language for various reasons, I can't do anything about this and on the whole most works are tagged correctly.

People sometimes tag for the wrong fandom, either on purpose or by accident, or works are wrangled into QSMP even though they don't necessarily involve the server. Wranglers make decisions based off usage, but if you genuinely feel there is some error in how something is wrangled, you can make a polite request for it to be fixed with Support and Feedback.

I am a volunteer tag wrangler for AO3; this does not give me any extra data-gathering capabilities nor do I agree with all actions/statements the org makes. I am disclosing this, and always disclose this, to make sure people are aware of any bias I may have. This is not free reign to harass me or any other wranglers who disclose their volunteer work.

If I did any math wrong, please politely let me know and I will fix the data. Again, I am not a statistician nor particularly talented at math, I'm just a nerd about languages and I enjoy looking at stats. Also sometimes people post or delete works while I'm in the middle of doing stats (this has happened, without fail, every time I've done these), so the numbers are inevitably a little off. I've learned to live with it.

[atthebell-moved]

Updated QSMP AO3 Work Language Stats-- as of July 9th, 2023

Hello! Doing an update to my June 6th, 2023 QSMP AO3 stats post going over the languages QSMP works are tagged with, one month (approx.) later. Feel free to refresh yourself with last month's data, as I'll be referencing it throughout this post.

We're just going to start off with the plain stats, and then we'll do comparisons to a month ago as well as analysis. The analysis will probably be similar to last time, as I don't think a ton has changed. Long post ahead!

Fun tidbits at the start:

QSMP has 2147 works as of today (July 9, 2023)! That's a difference of 714 works from the original 1433 works, so about a 50% increase.

English is still the most commonly tagged language, and its percentage has actually gone up a small amount since last month. Brazilian Portuguese has also gone up to 3.07%, while Spanish has slightly decreased in terms of percentage.

Some new languages added to the mix! There's now one work written in Malaysian Malay, and French finally has some works.

Speaking of! There's now works in all of the four spoken languages on the server :D

I used the same methodology as last time, which was to manually filter by each language I expected to have works, then do the math to make sure I wasn't missing any. You can check the previous post to find that info as well as how I got my AO3 total works stats.

Okay! Now onto numbers:

Getting into the stats:

QSMP Works

[Image Description: A table with three columns; the first lists languages, the second the number of works, and the third the percentage of total works. For the languages column, each language is listed first in that language and then in English in parentheses, and English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French are all color-coded to indicate that they are spoken on the server. End ID.]

The most commonly tagged language, like I said above, is English, with 1751 works or 81.56% of total works in the QSMP fandom tag.

The second most commonly tagged language is Spanish, with 317 works and 14.76% of the fandom. Next is Brazilian Portuguese at 66 works and 3.07%.

French has works now! There are 5 works, which is about 0.23% of works in the fandom tag.

And the next four are not spoken on the server, but several are unsurprising (discussed in the previous stats post, but reiterated below): Mandarin at 3 works and 0.14%, Russian at 2 works with 0.09%, Latin at 1 work with 0.05%, Esperanto at 1 work with 0.05%, and Malaysian Malay at 1 work with 0.05%.

Preliminary observations! English, like I said, has gone up a bit in terms of percentage, as has Brazilian Portuguese, while Spanish has gone down. It's not a huge percentage difference, but I'll discuss my limited theories as to why that change might've happened.

The only really new language this month, as French was expected to get works since it's spoken on the server, is Malaysian Malay. I don't know a ton about Malay in general, so I don't want to speak too much about it in terms of population, but if any Malay speakers or Southeast Asians familiar with it have anything to add, feel free! This work is a translation of an English work by the same author, which is rad; I'll talk a bit more about translations below. Otherwise I don't have any particular observations other than wanting to note that it's a new language and I'm happy to see it!

Across All fandoms

[Image Description: The same table as above, this time with numbers for all fandoms across AO3. End ID.]

The most commonly tagged language is English at 10,154,701 works and 89.31% of all works on AO3.

Spanish has 133,743 works and 1.18%

Brazilian Portuguese has 31,218 works and 0.27%

French has 53,917 works and 0.47%

Mandarin has 638,576 works and 5.61%

Russian has 241,121 works and 2.12%

Latin has 165 works and 0.0015%

Esperanto has 106 works and 0.00093%

Malaysian Malay has 119 works and 0.001%

I don't have a ton of new observations for this, as I don't think any changes were all that significant, and QSMP is so much smaller than the total works that comparison is more helpful in terms of indicating which languages are typically used on the site versus commonly spoken languages, which don't always align.

Changes Since Last Month:

[Image Descriptions: Two tables, identical to those above aside from the numbers in each cell. One is the QSMP numbers from last month, as linked at the top of the post. One is the QSMP numbers for this month, as displayed above. End ID.]

Like I said above, English, Brazilian Portuguese, and French have gone up in terms of percentage while Spanish has gone down.

Mandarin and Russian have both gained one work each, and Latin and Esperanto have stayed at one work.

New language! Malay has gained one work, a translation of an English work by the same author.

Time for analysis!

Analysis/Theories:

First thing I want to look at is the fact that Spanish has gone down in terms of percentage, and why that may be. The change is not wildly significant, and the fandom is growing fairly quickly, so I don't think it's a huge difference, but I still wanted to talk about it briefly. My biggest theory is just that as other languages have gained more works, Spanish has not grown quite as quickly in that time. Portuguese went up a bit, meaning its percentage has likely cut into Spanish's, alongside a few others gaining works. Remember that percentages work like a pie chart-- when one percentage increases, one or more of the rest must decrease. I don't have many other theories, and again, I don't think this is that huge of a difference.

French has works now! Honestly, this is completely unsurprising to me. French creators have had far more time to settle in, get involved in lore, and French fans have had more time to get interested in the server generally. Hope to see many more to come!

I don't have any significant analysis when it comes to the Malay fic, other than that I think the nature of QSMP will continue to encourage new fics in new languages. QSMP is about cross-cultural communication and encouraging people to speak their own languages as well as learn about others'; I think it makes perfect sense for people to want to write fic in their native languages, even more so than a typical fandom. Excited to see this continue, particularly in the case of minority and endangered languages.

Translation! I brought this up in the last post, so I don't want to carry on about it too much, but there are still plenty of works that are translations, which I think is very cool. Translation is a huge element of the server and of the fandom and I think it's really lovely that people took on the very arduous effort of translating theirs and others' works into other languages. Massive kudos!

Otherwise, I think my analysis from last time stands-- tl;dr, QSMP is far more likely to have Spanish and Portuguese works than AO3 generally because of the nature of the server, the server members, and the way that Spanish MCYT fandom in particular has grown in the last several years.

Last time I talked about Eng, Esp, and Prt-br speakers being really central to lore, and this time I would just add that I think several French members, namely Baghera and Etoiles, have made themselves significant within lore and just all-around fan favorites, so I hope to continue to see more works in French but also just more works about them in general. Cellbit is still hot, that hasn't changed, and I think the dynamics of streamer attractiveness aren't really something key to this kind of analysis, although they're certainly interesting.

Disclaimers, Conclusions, Final Notes:

I am not a statistician! I just think fandom stats are interesting. If I did any math wrong, please let me know. I also want to note that I'm not doing any particularly quantitative analysis here aside from turning work numbers into percentages, and that is partially intentional, as I don't think there's enough works at this time to do anything really strenuous, just to make some observations.

Going to copy-paste this note from last time, as well, as I think it's an important element about the multilingualism of the QSMP that is less common in other fandoms:

Due to the nature of the server, there is also a huge number of works that contain elements of multiple languages, ranging from a few works to a decent chunk of the dialogue swapping between languages. This is not completely unheard of in fandoms, of course, as there are many fandoms which provide the opportunity for multilingualism, but this is fun to note because it's so present in the canon itself. I would argue there's a decent number of fics that are themselves bilingual/trilingual/multilingual, and I wish AO3 had a way of tagging them as such. I'm not sure if there are any freeforms along those lines, but I have seen some folks noting in their tags that there's some amount of Spanish/Portuguese in them as well as English, and the same goes for the Spanish fics I've looked at.

^ I hope that continues to be a trend in fic, and I think that it continues the spirit of multilingualism both on the server and in the fandom.

Once again, here is the link to the stats as of June 6, 2023, and I hope you all enjoyed looking at these numbers!

[gomzdrawfr]

‧₊˚✧Welcome˚₊‧⁺˖ ‎

A lil bit about myself:

Im Gomz (used to go by Gummmy), I have a panda persona

she/her

Im from Malaysia (apa khabar yall) I can speak Mandarin, Malay and English

╭──────────.★..─╮ My socials ╰─..★.──────────╯

My carrd

What I do in different social media (besides sharing doodles):

Tumblr (you're here!) -> almost everything, this is like my central hub for everything COD with a mix of other fandoms that I am interested in, and also my OC things, certified gomz the yapper reside in this place

Twitter -> lesser OC stuff, polls and ask request occasionally, I would say this place primarily only have my COD doodles(yk, without the mix of other fandoms) also a lot of my moots are there where I retweet their amazing fics and arts so come visit if you'd like (at your own risk though cuz codtwt is...reputable)

Instagram -> I post wips and silly meme in my stories, drawing process in reels and sometimes my irl stuff! (mostly me whining about Uni if you're interested)

Kofi

Consider checking out my:

Kofi membership (5USD or 10USD/month)

Shop (free wallpapers)

Commissions (status: OPEN)

╭──────────.★..─╮ Navigation ╰─..★.──────────╯

#gummmyart has all the doodle I drew

#gummmyspeaks has all the rambles I ever talk about

ask response, thanks for the ask <3 is when I answer my inboxes

I am also on AO3 where I post my OC fics

#prompt redraw has redraws of incorrect cod quotes

╭──────────.★..─╮ Content ╰─..★.──────────╯

predominantly call of duty fanarts + my cod oc (soon I want to branch out to the LOTR/The Hobbit fandom)

My masterlist of my contents (these are only a fraction of what I draw)

I reblog a lot, because it helps to boost other people's work and more people should see what others have created!

╭──────────.★..─╮ OC ╰─..★.──────────╯

Main OC that I will yap about is my cod oc Raven

I do oc x cannon content

everything about my oc is tagged with [oc]Raven or Raven[oc]

Her masterlist [half updated as of July 2024]

Her character sheet [outdated]

Her color palette

Raven fanbox (collection of fanart of my oc from my friends and followers)

╭──────────.★..─╮ Q&A ╰─..★.──────────╯

1. I like your doodles, can I set it as my profile picture/header/banner?

yes you can! just make sure you credit me ♡

2. Can I draw your oc?

yES BY ALL MEANS!! if you do just tag me and I'll be happy to come see ♡♡♡

3. Can I expand your doodles? (ex: continue the story, make a fic, make another drawing etc)

yes, yes you can, again just tag me when you do! im always excited to see what other takes other people have

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Enjoy your stay <3

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Woon Fei Ting who’s a Research Associate and the Lab Manager at the Brain, Language & Intersensory Perception Lab at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about kids in multilingual environments. We’d like to extend a huge thanks to Dr. Suzy Styles, who heads the BLIP lab at NTU, for hosting me in Singapore! Check out our interview with Suzy about which words sound spiky across languages. See the link in the show notes. But first, some announcements. We’re doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow just a few days after this episode goes up. The liveshow is online at 4:00 p.m. on February the 18th, for me in Montreal, or 8:00 a.m. on the 19th for Lauren in Melbourne, 2023. Follow the link in the show notes fore more time zones. This liveshow is a Q&A about language and gender with returning special guest, Dr. Kirby Conrod. You may remember Kirby from their very popular episode about the grammar of “singular they,” so we’re bringing them back for more informal discussion which you can participate in. You can ask your language and gender-y questions or share your examples and stories in the comments on Patreon or in the AMA questions channel on Discord in advance or bring them along to the liveshow. You can join the Lingthusiasm liveshow by becoming a patron at the Lingthusiast tier or higher. This is also the tier that has access to our monthly bonus episodes – most recently, a chat between me and Lauren about what’s coming up in the year ahead, including our plans to keep giving you regular episodes while Lauren’s on parental leave. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to the liveshow, monthly bonus episodes, and more.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Fei Ting, welcome to the show!

Fei Ting: Hi, thanks for having me. This is the first time I’m doing any kind of interview and the first time being on a podcast.

Gretchen: Amazing! We’re excited to be your very first time. Can we start with the question that we ask all of our guests? How did you get into linguistics?

Fei Ting: My younger sibling was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was maybe around the age of 9 or 10, then she started going for English language classes to help her spell. That was when my older sibling and I started realising that we display a lot of the same quote-unquote “symptoms,” or we have the same struggles. I started doing a little bit of reading and got really interested in this idea of, oh, maybe we’re all dyslexic, but then she got a diagnosis because it was a lot more prominent, or it came out a lot more in her day-to-day schooling. Later on in high school, my high school is right next to a school for children with cerebral palsy. I would go over once a week to be a teaching assistant to help out if the teachers need any help. One of the things that we did was to bring the children to their speech therapy sessions. The speech therapist there at that time was a very nice lady. She was from India. She was teaching some of these children how to pronounce particular consonants or vowel sounds as best as they could. She spoke with a really heavy accent. I thought to myself, “Well, these children are Singaporean children, and they’re receiving speech therapy in an accent that is unfamiliar to them” –

Gretchen: Yeah, is this gonna be any use for them?

Fei Ting: Yeah, and they are – well, a lot of them have a lot of, as you can imagine, modal difficulties, some of them with language development difficulties. When they mimic, they also mimic the accent as well.

Gretchen: So, they’re gonna be mimicking her accent, which is a perfectly fine accent to have but not what the rest of their family and community have.

Fei Ting: Yeah. At that time, I was just thinking about, okay, this is a cool job. I had never come across speech therapy before in my life. I didn’t even know what it was. So, when I first learned about it, I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool!” But at the same time, I also thought, “Maybe this is what I wanna do in the future.” I set out looking at which universities to go to, what do I have to do to become a speech therapist. It led me on to this path of going to university for linguistics, and then I taught for a little bit. I taught for about 4 years.

Gretchen: Teaching what?

Fei Ting: Teaching English after graduation. In between, I did some volunteering work, and I looked at the overall job market for speech therapy in Singapore. The thing about it in Singapore is a lot of our speech therapists don’t really get to do a lot of speech therapy per se.

Gretchen: Oh, that seems like it’s not the thing you came into the job for.

Fei Ting: A lot of them end up doing elderly care, swallowing therapy with patients that might have suffered from a stroke.

Gretchen: But you were excited about working with kids.

Fei Ting: Yeah. I was told by almost every speech therapist that there isn’t that much focus on research right now because they are hoping that a lot of people just graduate with a master’s in speech therapy and then go work in a hospital. Then you will likely not be working with children.

Gretchen: I guess there’s the question of like, what are Singaporean children quote-unquote “expected” to be able to do at a certain age or is there even research on what their typically developing peers would be able to do in this context that would help you devise therapy programmes for kids.

Fei Ting: At that point, no. I think right now as well – this is the current work that we’re doing, right, looking at children growing up in Singapore, which is a really multilingual environment. The documentation of regular kids, we don’t have good documentation of that yet, and therefore, you can think about how, for children that have some sort of language delay or developmental disorders, we don’t have therapy that might be tailored to our variety of English and the other languages that we speak here.

Gretchen: I feel like something that I’ve heard from people in more monolingual or monolingual-ish language environments in Canada/the US is “Oh, well, my sibling got diagnosed with dyslexia or something, and so my parents stopped speaking our heritage language to the kid because they thought it would confuse them, and they did only English.” We know that lots of people are multilingual, and this is fine, but there isn’t a good amount of knowledge about what does it look like to develop in a multilingual environment where this is normal and expected and everyone is doing this. It would cause difficulties to not be able to function in that multilingual space because you can’t talk to your grandparents, or you can’t talk to people in some stores that you go into. That’s also part of what you need for functioning in a language is having access to multiple language spaces.

Fei Ting: That’s exactly right. In Singapore – well, I think this is unfortunate – some of the children who are diagnosed with dyslexia earlier on, they will be given recommendations to not do the – well, we call it here the “mother tongue languages,” which in schools are taught as Mandarin Chinese, Malay, or Tamil. The recommendation is, well, don’t do your mother tongue language as a subject.

Gretchen: Only do English, and that’s it.

Fei Ting: Only do English, yeah, which as you mentioned, it then becomes difficult for the child to converse with people around them or their family members who might not be using English.

Gretchen: Right. Because the norm of the research that’s been happening on kids with various developmental disabilities has been doing it on monolingual populations, which then makes it seem like you need to be monolingual in order to benefit from the various kinds of therapies that people do.

Fei Ting: The common misconception is, if you’re already struggling in one, and that one language is usually English, then let’s not burden your brain with a second one. But languages are so different. Mandarin Chinese is radically different compared to English both in the way it looks as well as the structure, so processing of Mandarin Chinese is also different. There isn’t enough research right now to support saying that a child who is English-Mandarin bilingual will benefit from not having to do Mandarin as a subject in school.

Gretchen: I mean, the brain is very flexible, very plastic, and so the things you make the brain do, it almost makes me wonder if being exposed to more languages would help because you’re giving the brain more practice in doing language stuff, but I dunno if there’s data on this.

Fei Ting: Well, we don’t know enough.

Gretchen: But you’re not currently a speech therapist.

Fei Ting: No, I’m not.

Gretchen: You work in a language lab. How did that happen, and what are you working on now?

Fei Ting: I did my undergraduate degree in linguistics, which I loved. It was fantastic. I think for the first time when our professors were like, “Let’s do research on the languages that you speak,” it was the first time that I thought, “Oh, you mean I can study Singapore English, like Singlish, in an academic setting? You mean it’s worthy of being studied?” I think that was the first thing. Then later on, after graduation, because I had looked at what speech therapy is and isn’t in Singapore currently, I thought, “Well, maybe I should go and do some work, earn some money, and then think about whether or not I wanna do grad school,” and then I think eventually settled on just my love for research more than being a therapist or going out and practicing in a clinical setting. I decided to pursue my master’s, and then after that, I just stayed with the same lab.

Gretchen: As a day-to-day level, as a lab manager, you’re working with and supervising the various studies that are being run by the professors and students and people in the lab. Yeah, what do you do as a lab manager?

Fei Ting: The number one thing is coordinating the different studies that go on. We have studies that are carried out independently by our PhD students. We also have studies that we run as a group amongst all of our research assistants and our student assistants, and then just making sure that everything is running on schedule. I also do a lot of prep before any study’s been conducted. We write all of our surveys. We make sure that all of the equipment is well set up. Then there is also the administrative side of things, which is the boring and less-glamorous part of research.

Gretchen: This is working on writing grants or filling out paperwork to get permission to work with children. You have to go through the ethics board and tell them, “No, we’re not gonna harm the children. It’s gonna be fine. They’re just gonna look at some pictures and hear some sounds or something.” If you’ve got equipment – like you’ve got an EEG machine, which is the electrode cap that you put on your head, and you can see the brain waves going. I guess that probably needs to be maintained.

Fei Ting: We need to watch that very thoroughly. We need to train our students when they come into the lab on how to use it. We have interns come in every summer, and they do good work with us. I also manage all of our interns and, I think, help our students or our undergrads see what’s the reality behind doing research. I think, very often, they might think about grad school, or they might think about moving into the field of academia after graduation, just seeing the glam side of things, or looking at papers that are being published, or books that are being written.

Gretchen: And papers look very polished, right. Like, “Oh, we did this thing. We had 32 infants. They came in and did this.” It doesn’t tell you like, “This infant started crying, and so we had to exclude them,” or like, “These infants – we tried to call their parents, and they wouldn’t reply to our messages, and so they wouldn’t come in. We actually tried to get 52, but only 32 came.”

Fei Ting: Yes, the day-to-day of it is very mundane. A lot of the work that we are focusing now on is understanding the linguistic landscape for children growing up in Singapore, so we wanna find out what’s going on at home: Who is talking to them, and in what languages, and in what proportion? The best way to do that right now is to send them home with a little recorder.

Gretchen: I’ve seen this recorder. It’s sort of the size of a credit card but thicker. You put it in a shirt that the child wears, and it has a little Velcro pocket, so it doesn’t fall it. Then it runs, and the kid can run around, and you’re not trying to keep them in front of a mic where they have to stay still, which because they’re toddlers, they’re not gonna do that. You can hear anything that the infant says and also anything that someone says, like an adult or an older child, says around them.

Fei Ting: That’s right. That recorder goes on for about 10-16 hours on its own. When we get that recording back, the humans have to go listen to these recordings. We do a lot of transcription work. That is one of the day-to-day mundane things. It’s not exciting. You sit in front of a computer, and you open up a file, and you’re listening, maybe, for an hour before you have to stop because it’s just too much. We do a lot of fine-grained transcription. We’re not only noting down the words that are being said, we are also looking at who’s saying it; we’re counting the number of turns; we’re making it for the different languages. Right now, I’m speaking English, but the day-to-day conversation for a Singaporean household might be English plus a lot of other things that are going on. Maybe it’s different from what we conventionally understand as code-switching or the way that code-switching is being described in textbooks is that you switch very elegantly from one language to the other in a nice, wrapped up sentence.

Gretchen: Right. So, it’s saying like, okay, I’m gonna say this bit in, for me, English, and then French or something, and I’m going back and forth. This implies that these two languages are distinct entities that I’m switching back and forth between them. But if you’ve grown up in a multilingual household your whole life, and your parents have also grown up in a multilingual household, what you’re also doing is producing the whole spectrum in a way that’s like how people have produced it around you but also may be a little bit different.

Fei Ting: It’s not “clean” code switching. It happens within an utterance. People swap out words, and sometimes it’s conscious, sometimes it’s unconscious, sometimes it’s deliberate to make a point. The way that we describe it, or I like to think about it, is if you have a salad bowl of different components – you have your tomatoes; you have your cucumber and onions – as I’m speaking to a different person, I can decide which part of the salad I wanna pick, which ingredient I wanna pick. It’s not a clean switch. For me, it would be English and Mandarin. It's not a clean switch between the two. Then, of course, there’s this very exciting thing called “Singlish.”

Gretchen: This is stuff that’s unique to Singapore. “Singlish” seems to imply that it’s English-y, but there’s stuff from lots of languages involved.

Fei Ting: When I was in university, and when we first looked at it from a very academic setting, it’s often described as a “creoloid.” It’s a little bit like a creole but maybe not. Then people have explained to it say that, oh, the backbone of Singlish is English, and then it’s added with all these vocabulary from non-English languages.

Gretchen: This is gonna be like Chinese but less Mandarin.

Fei Ting: Less Mandarin, for sure. More Hokkien. In some other parts of the world, “Hokkien” is also referred to as “Min Nan.” Then some Cantonese, some Teochew, Hakka, and then some Malay, and some Tamil.

Gretchen: So, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, and Hakka are all Chinese varieties within that, and then Malay and Tamil are separate from other regions of the world. These are all groups that have been part of Singapore.

Fei Ting: We were colonised by the British for a long time. Before that time, we didn’t really have people living on the island. Well, historically, if you look at it, there were fishermen or fishing villages, but largely this island is uninhabited. Then when the British came, and they decide to develop this place, or this island, as a port, obviously, lots of people came for work opportunities. We saw a lot of migration from modern-day south part of China, so the Guangzhou/Guangdong region. We also saw some migration from modern-day Malaysia and Indonesia and then from the southern part of India. That’s why the Indian language that’s spoken here, predominantly, by people at that time was Tamil instead of Hindi, for example.

Gretchen: These are the big ethnic groups in Singapore’s history. And then when people are coming into contact with them, they get mixed together – people using words from all sorts of sources. This is what kids are exposed to in the home. It’s not just “Oh, here’s Chinese. Here’s Mandarin,” which is the most famous version of Chinese, “but also here are words from Hokkien or Teochew or these other varieties,” and also, I guess, probably depending on the kid’s heritage, whether they’re gonna have more Malay words or more Tamil words or more Chinese words.

Fei Ting: That’s right.

Gretchen: What does this look like when you’re trying to say, “Here are the results that we have. This is what kids are getting exposed to”?

Fei Ting: I think the thing that we didn’t expect was to do so much language documentation as part of this project. Because what we wanna do is find out, you know, what are kids growing up hearing. But then, along the way, because we were collecting all of this data, we are also documenting what is the current state of things for what Singlish sounds like or what we can say what Singlish is in a household right now. If we look at the Singapore census, the last one was taken in 2020, a huge number of the younger population now say that English is the predominant home language. It has crossed the 50% threshold for the younger age groups. That’s a first in our country’s history. You can also imagine that the English here or the Singlish here is changing rapidly compared to my parents’ or my grandparents’ era.

Gretchen: What people are doing is changing. If you say English is a dominant home language, that’s picking one out of probably there are still several languages being spoken in this mixed way.

Fei Ting: Understanding what Singlish is is one thing, and then when we are writing it in our paper, how do we make ourselves well understood for an audience that is unfamiliar with research in a non-standard variety. One of the things that we tried explaining is this term that we use called “red-dot.” We have a current study going on called “Red-dot Baby-talk” where we have a list of words that we come up with based on what we know Singaporean parents use with their children, and we’re asking Singaporeans, “At what age do you think a child would know this word?” and “Would you use this word with a child?”

Gretchen: Just to back up for second. “Red-dot” is a term for Singapore, right, because if you look at a big map of the world, it’s a city state, effectively, it’s about the size of a red dot on a map. So, this is an affectionate way of referring to Singapore-specific words.

Fei Ting: Mm-hmm, yeah. One of the words would be “pom pom.” I might say it to a child after they’ve had a long day, and they’re sweaty, and I say, “Okay, now it’s time to pom-pom.”

Gretchen: Is this like “have a bath” or “a shower” or something?

Fei Ting: Yeah! That’s right. We don’t know – at least I have no idea – where that word came from. My guess is it’s from one of these Chinese varieties that we talked about just now, but I’m not 100% certain.

Gretchen: Right. Because it doesn’t have a clear etymology linked to any particular language. It’s just this is a word people use in Singapore with kids.

Fei Ting: Then we have “zut-zut,” which is the thing that you give to a crying child.

Gretchen: Like a candy or something, or a toy?

Fei Ting: Like a pacifier.

Gretchen: “Pacifier,” “binky,” “dummy” – I’ve heard a lot of words for it – “soother.”

Fei Ting: Then we also have the word “sayang.” “sayang” is – well, originated from Malay, but the use of it in Malay, it’s very different from the use of it in Singlish. In Malay, it can be used as a verb to mean, like, “love.” It can also be used as a term of affection. You can call someone your “sayang,” your “darling.” But in Singlish, it’s this action of stroking very gently. If you see a little cat, you might tell your child to “sayang” the cat.

Gretchen: “Make sure you do it gently and don’t pull the cat’s fur and their tail and make them scratch you.”

Fei Ting: If someone in that context is using the word “sayang,” I wouldn’t necessarily say that that person is code switching into Malay.

Gretchen: Right, because it has a different meaning in Malay, and they’re not using it with that meaning.

Fei Ting: And I’m not a Malay speaker, so when I use the word “sayang,” I can’t say that I’m code switching into Malay. I’ve just chosen a token in Singlish.

Gretchen: I can see how they’re used in a child-specific context, but there’re other parts of Singlish that are just part of the everyday vocabulary for adults and stuff as well.

Fei Ting: Yes, yes, yes, that’s right. So, you’ve been here a few days now, and food is a big thing in Singapore, and when food is good or when things are going well, in a good scenario, we can say, “shiok.”

Gretchen: I’ve seen this on some signs. It seems to be – I was walking in one of the streets, and they were saying, “shiok” because they were trying to say, “This food is good,” and it’s good in a Singaporean sort of way. I think the sign said, “Shiok lah,” which was maybe a little bit trying to be really heavy on the Singlish thing because “lah” is this famous word in Singlish that is used as a particle at the end of sentences for a lot of different purposes.

Fei Ting: For a lot of different purposes. We have a lot of these sentence-final, utterance-final particles. Origin of it is from Chinese varieties. We have “lah,” “leh,” “meh,” “hor,” “liao” – maybe lots of other ones that I’m missing right now.

Gretchen: There’s probably a whole list. I mean, we can link to some things about Singlish if people want to get a larger picture of what’s going on. This is not the teach-us-Singlish-in-half-an-hour episode. But yeah, the one that I’ve heard people say a fair bit is “lah” because it seems to be pretty common. It’s like a confirmation or question.

Fei Ting: Confirmation. It’s also sometimes used to make something sound final and definitive. Like if you ask me if I could do something, and I say, “Can lah.”

Gretchen: This gets us to another one that I’ve also heard people use which is “Can” by itself as sort of a response to questions or whether something can happen. I was in a cab, and the cab driver said, “Can?”, as in, “Can you get out okay?”, or “Are you doing this?”, and I guess I probably should’ve responded, “Can,” but I don’t have this naturally yet. Maybe if I’m here a little bit longer.

Fei Ting: You can say, “Can,” or “Can can.” “Can can” is to confirm that you can actually do something, or it can happen.

Gretchen: I think the closest thing that I have to that in my English is “Can do,” which still drops the subject or doesn’t have the subject there, but for some reason I want the “do” to be there – “Can do.” Or like, “I can,” “I think I can,” compared to, I heard someone say, “Think can,” where I would say, “I think I can.”

Fei Ting: Over here “Think can” or “I think can” is very well-formed. “I think I can” is –

Gretchen: Almost too much?

Fei Ting: Yeah, almost too much.

Gretchen: Or you’re being very emphatic about that it’s “I” think I can – may “you” don’t. This is probably Chinese influence, right?

Fei Ting: Yeah. If we think about Chinese as a language that determines the topic of the sentence first, and then you add comments to that topic, that’s why we can go about dropping the subject or dropping a lot of these modal verbs. One of the studies that we did previously was, well, one of our undergrads started this project. We ask people to look at different menus and order the same dish but to imagine themselves in three different settings. The first setting is the menu is printed on really nice, fancy paper, and fancy font, and it’s supposed to mimic a fancy restaurant. The second menu is in casual font, and the setting is a hip café. Then the last one, we didn’t have a menu, but it was just a picture of a hawker centre stall front.

Gretchen: The hawker centres have a whole bunch of little marketplaces but indoors. They have all these food stalls. You go around from each one and you sit – I think of them as cafeteria tables. You sit out at them. You have a tray, and you get food and drinks and desserts and stuff from different places. This is very informal.

Fei Ting: Yeah, very, very informal. We had undergrads come in and order the same dish which is the dish of laksa.

Gretchen: Which I’ve now had. It was very good. It’s kind of a spicy soup.

Fei Ting: Yeah. And then the instruction was that, when they ordered it, they have to ask for more chili, and they should ask to take it away.

Gretchen: Just to give them more things to say.

Fei Ting: Yeah. So, when people are imagining themselves in a very fancy restaurant, they might say, “Can I please have a bowl of laksa? Can you add more chili? And I would like to have it taken away.”

Gretchen: These very full sentences and trying to be polite and add this extra ornamentation around that.

Fei Ting: Mm-hmm. Then when you do a syntax analysis on it, I mean, we draw grammar trees, you end up with a very complex grammar tree or quite a number of grammar trees just to explain this one scenario. But when they’re given a picture of a hawker stall, and they’re supposed to imagine a very informal setting, they can say something like, “Aunty, one laksa, more chili, takeaway.”

Gretchen: “Aunty, one laksa, more chili, takeaway,” just saying each of the bits of information without, “Oh, please, if you don’t mind, can I have this.”

Fei Ting: You don’t need the “Can I have…” You don’t need the extra verbs or the extra sentence structure. It’s just the topic – “one laksa,” and then “more chili,” and then “takeaway.”

Gretchen: And this is not rude. This is polite. This is a normal thing you say. And you’ve said “Aunty” because you’re addressing the stall owner as “Aunty” or “Uncle,” based on who they are, which is polite.

Fei Ting: That’s also another thing about – I think you hear it here in Singapore. You also would hear it in Malaysia. This calling everyone “Aunty” and “Uncle” even though they’re not related to you if they are somewhere like the age your parents might be, and then you just – “Aunty,” “Uncle” – everyone is.

Gretchen: You have other words for people who are closer in age to you or younger?

Fei Ting: Not quite.

Gretchen: It’s more about elders.

Fei Ting: It’s more for elders. If I approach, like – or if I’m in a cab – the “Taxi Uncle” might address me as “Xiao Mei,” like “Little Girl” or “Young Girl.” Or if I’m ordering something, and they wanna be nice and polite, they might say, “Mei Nü,” which is “Pretty Girl.” Even though –

Gretchen: They’re not hitting on you. This is just a polite thing to say.

Fei Ting: Yeah. But usually you will hear them say “Xiao Mei,” which is “Little Girl,” to a female and then “Xiao Di” to a guy ordering something.

Gretchen: Because you have that age thing. In French, I’m used to people addressing me as “Madame” or “Mademoiselle.” There was a period when I was getting 50/50, and now it’s mostly “Madame,” so clearly people think I’ve gotten older. But there was a period when it depended on what on wore for which one I would get. How strangers address you in public is just –

Fei Ting: If my mom were to go to the market, for example, she might address someone working there as “Aunty,” and then they will also address her as “Aunty.”

Gretchen: We’re both at the right age where we could have nieces and nephews, so we’re both “Aunties” now.

Fei Ting: And that’s perfectly fine.

Gretchen: You’ve also been doing some interesting things with research methodology and how to get this audio data, apart from bringing parents into the lab and having them talk to kids.

Fei Ting: Well, with COVID, everything was interrupted. I think people who are doing research – everyone would commiserate over our lack of ability to reach out to parents with little kids. We did a years-long study on Zoom.

Gretchen: So, you get parents talking to their kids on Zoom. Kids aren’t always very good at interacting with a computer, with the technology.

Fei Ting: We had 8- to 36-month-olds. The task was for their parents to describe to them a wordless picture book on Zoom. Sometimes, like you said, some kids are clearly not interested.

Gretchen: But at least having a picture book to look at gives them something to do on camera and not just like, “C’mon, talk! Talk to the nice research aunty.”

Fei Ting: Exactly. Because the picture book is wordless, it’s up to them in what language they would like to do the task in. Some parents get very excited about describing every single thing on the screen instead of just following along the main storyline. Sometimes, they will break off to “Oh, you remember, we saw an elephant” – because in the book, there is an elephant – and then they might, “the other day” or “the other time, we went to the zoo. We saw an elephant. You remember.” And then they might go on talking about other things, which is a nice thing about wordless picture books, actually.

Gretchen: It just gives them some stimulus to talk about, rather than just being like, “Okay, here we are in front of a computer. All we can talk about is the computer.” Now, you’ve got the elephant as a topic of conversation.

Fei Ting: And I don’t know about kids growing up in this COVID period. Maybe they’ve gotten used to seeing another human onscreen. We didn’t have kids who were like, “Ah, this is so weird. I don’t wanna do this anymore.”

Gretchen: Because they’re already talking to, probably, other friends and family members and things using Zoom because they’re pandemic babies.

Fei Ting: Exactly. We had some funny things that happened. This brings back to the reality of doing research. Sometimes, I would have parents carry the laptop they were talking to me on, on Zoom, and chasing after their kid, or like, “Ah, just come back here. This nice lady is waiting for us to finish the story,” and things like that happened. Or because we’re recording them in their home, sometimes someone walks into the room that they’re in. These sort of unexpected scenarios do pop up from time to time, but we’re really happy with the data that we managed to collect.

Gretchen: Do you have results for that yet?

Fei Ting: We have a methods paper out because, as part of the study, we ran it as a micro-longitudinal intervention study.

Gretchen: What does that mean?

Fei Ting: The intervention that we ran was for the parents. We wanted to see if giving parents tips – concrete tips – on what they can do with their child to improve or to add on to the kind of talk they can have with their child, whether or not that would influence or change the way that they would communicate with their kids. The baseline was describing the wordless picture book the first time, and then they would go through an intervention for –

Gretchen: So, they would get text messages every day for 28 days that would say things like, “Have you considered singing songs with your kid?”, or “When you see pictures, talking about what’s in the pictures,” or something like that?

Fei Ting: Every day we gave them a tip. The tips start out really easy like doing some counting, and then the last we tell parents about concepts that might be a bit more advanced, things like mental state verbs – so verbs like “I think” or “I wonder.” There is literature to show that when you use mental state verbs with your child, 1). you’re helping them imagine scenarios they are not in, right, think about it from someone else’s perspective. So, this ties in with this thing called the “theory of mind.” Then when you use these words, especially in English, your sentences get a bit more complex.

Gretchen: Because if you’re saying, “I think this,” and then you have to have another sentence in there, which is not quite the same thing if you’re doing like, “Think can.”

Fei Ting: Exactly. After 28 days, we see them again on Zoom for the same video call picture book description. Then we ran it as an RTT – randomised control trial.

Gretchen: So, they’re randomly in one group that has these 28 tips in between, and then another group that has something less.

Fei Ting: The other group, we only gave them one email a week. There’re no concrete tips. It’s just emphasising on how important it is to talk to their child. But because the way we advertise it, we said, “You can sign up. We’ll give you some tips.”

Gretchen: Ah, so this was important to make parents wanna participate in the study because they think they’re doing something good for their child by getting some tips there. Because there’s lots of reasons people wanna participate in studies. Sometimes, you pay them. Sometimes, the kid gets a toy or something. But also, in this case they wanted to feel like they were getting some help with raising a kid.

Fei Ting: Yeah. After the first 28 days and then after we saw them for a second time point, we swapped both groups of parents around. If you had intervention, now you’re in the non-intervention group, and you only got one email per week. Then the parents who didn’t get the tips previously, they now got a message every day.

Gretchen: So, are you sitting there texting all the parents individually? Or do you have an automatic system?

Fei Ting: No, we don’t. Our research assistant, Shaza, she was doing all the texting. Because it was a rolling sign up programme –

Gretchen: You have some people who are on Day 2, and some people who’re on Day 20, and they each need to get a different message. It’s almost complicated to program.

Fei Ting: It’s difficult. She would text them at 10:00 in the morning and say, “Today’s tip is this.” And then with each tip, we would also give a link to our website where they can read more if they wanted to. In the evening, around 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., she would text them again and say, “Hi Parent, did you try our tip today? How did you find it?” That’s the other unique part of our intervention because a lot of the times when people are in an intervention, they’re left alone for the entirety, and then at the end they might be given a feedback survey.

Gretchen: It’s almost just as much about having the support for talking about what parenting was like and reflecting on using language with their child that they feel like they got some sort of emotional support out of it.

Fei Ting: Yeah. Or any kind of interaction. Because at that time, well, we started collecting data June of 2020.

Gretchen: This is lockdown.

Fei Ting: Lockdown, right. A lot of parents were working from home. People couldn’t see their family members. So, having a researcher to talk to might be nice.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s kind of nice.

Fei Ting: Or a lot of children, if they were going to infant care or day care, all of that had stopped.

Gretchen: Of course.

Fei Ting: I guess for a lot of parents, it was like, “Oh, I’m given some kind of support!”

Gretchen: It would be interesting, I guess, to try to figure out how much of that was pandemic or lockdown specific, especially if the parent is becoming the child’s only or primary source of language input in a way that, if they’re going to child care or preschool or seeing their relatives and stuff like that, they wouldn’t be as much dependent on one or two people for talking with the child all the time as language input, they would have a broader community access.

Fei Ting: That’s right. I think that was one of the things that parents have told us, like, “Oh, yeah, language input has changed.” It’s not something that they actively thought about, but then they’re like, “Oh, yeah, my kid’s not getting that much Malay because, well, my mom speaks to them in Malay, but now we can’t visit grandma anymore.”

Gretchen: This changes the way that the language input goes.

Fei Ting: We have a methods paper out. We are still transcribing.

Gretchen: Transcribing takes so long.

Fei Ting: It does.

Gretchen: I think the estimate that I learned in grad school was, like, for every one minute of audio, it takes an hour to transcribe.

Fei Ting: That’s the pace that we’re going at. We have been very blessed with lots of great transcribers and student assistants who’ve come in and helped us, so we are almost there. We’re very happy that we have 142 parents and families that stayed with us through all three time points. I think it’s a little rare to see that for a longitudinal study involving children.

Gretchen: They had nothing else to do in lockdown, so they stayed in your study.

Fei Ting: Yeah, I like to think that. And I also like to think that we were nice, and they found it useful.

Gretchen: To have the supportive text messages every day.

Fei Ting: We’re going into the next stage where we will be doing some analysis. We’re counting number of turns taken. We’re counting number of words and the diversity of words being used and whether or not people swapped or changed or code switched in any way.

Gretchen: And then you end up with, also, this linguistic landscape of how people are talking in their homes, at least, when they have a kid around. And you can see which bits there. When you’re talking about code switching, you can say, “Okay, these words are in English. These words are specifically in Hokkien or Mandarin. These words are in Tamil or Malay,” but you also have the Singlish-specific words, the Red-dot words, that are hard to pin down for one particular language.

Fei Ting: We’ve essentially written our own little dictionary, actually.

Gretchen: That’s great!

Fei Ting: Along the way, we were like, ah, there’s this word that’s come up, but because a lot of Singlish hasn’t been codified or documented, there is no one way to spell it.

Gretchen: Of course. Because it’s mostly spoken.

Fei Ting: If we’ve decided to spell it one way, we always have to check with other Singlish speakers around us, and then – we don’t wanna say, “Oh, we’re spelling it this way, and this way must be right.” We’re saying, “We have to come up with something.”

Gretchen: You have to pick one because if you wanna say, “Okay, for every hundred words that this parent says, 30 of them are in Malay, 50 of them are in English, 23 of them are in Singlish/Red-dot words.” It’s hard to pin down exactly which of them are from where, but you need to be able to look through and say, “This one word, ‘shiok,’ is being used this many times in the whole corpus,” not “We spelled it 14 different ways, and so we have no idea how many times it’s being used,” just for your own internal purposes, which isn’t to say that someone else is wrong for using a different spelling.

Fei Ting: That’s right. We wanna be very open about it, so we have a Wiki page that’s open for anyone who wants to come and look at our transcription conventions. Our dictionary is also open access, so people can come in and take a look at that, at how we’ve decided to codify certain things just because we need it for our own, like you mentioned, counts and things like that. The other part of our project is working with speech engineers. I’m sure you’re familiar with Siri and Google, right.

Gretchen: I talk into the – they transcribe me, they understand me. But I notice even when I’m speaking French to them, which I don’t have a native French accent, they’re not very good at transcribing what I’m saying in a language that isn’t like the very Paris French that they’re trained on. I bet this happens with Singlish.

Fei Ting: It’s a challenge. It’s difficult in Singlish. It’s difficult when people switch between or among the languages so rapidly. We had a PhD student from the engineering department that was on this project, and he was looking at how do you do automatic language identification on the recordings that we collected because –

Gretchen: This could save you a lot of time if it works.

Fei Ting: If it works. But it’s also a really challenging problem. One, it’s that it’s not the standard variety and then the other thing is it’s child directed. They don’t have good solutions for child-directed speech yet.

Gretchen: Because people talk differently to children. They maybe use, depending on the language, like a broader range of pitches, or higher pitches, maybe they talk a bit slower, they have child-specific vocabulary, like this word for “pacifier” which has a lot of child-specific words in different languages or different varieties. This is not the kind of thing that language models are trained on. They’re training on journalists talking on the news in this very formal context.

Fei Ting: That’s right. Our PhD student has done really great work. We also work with our speech engineers at Johns Hopkins University. Whenever we have meetings with them, I tell them, “Oh, I’m so sorry for our” – our data set’s really problematic. I know that. I understand that. But they see it as a great challenge.

Gretchen: Right. And if all you’re doing is news stuff, it’s less interesting or relevant. Maybe it’s a problem, but maybe the algorithms that were not accounting for it are the problem.

Fei Ting: Exactly. Our language models are only as good as the data that we train them on. They all come with a certain set of biases.

Gretchen: Absolutely.

Fei Ting: Right now, the bias is non-child-directed language.

Gretchen: And non-Singaporean language.

Fei Ting: Non-Singaporean language. It’s been interesting just looking at our data from their point of view as well. There’s gonna be more and more reliance on AI in the future, for sure, not just for our line of work but just part of our day-to-day living. If AI is supposed to accommodate the natural languages of the world, then it should be able to do this.

Gretchen: And it should actually be trained on how people talk in multilingual environments. Fei Ting, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Fei Ting: Thanks for having me.

Gretchen: If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?

Fei Ting: I think it would be that there’s still a lot that we don’t know. I think the brain is a fascinating organ, and a lot of what we do know about what the brain does when it comes to language processing and language acquisition, we know it from a very monolingual English point of view. Most of the people around the world are non-monolingual speakers, and a lot of them don’t speak English, so if we wanna know how this organ that we have works when it comes to language acquisition and language processing, then we need more research on non-monolingual English-speaking populations.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar, Just Analysing It” stickers, IPA posters, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. And our guest, Woon Fei Ting, can be found as @FeitingW on Twitter, and the lab is Facebook.com/bliplabntu. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you had more people to talk with about it? Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Fei Ting: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[elbiotipo]

We should make the world language a conlang that isn't eurocentric. I think combining the vocabulary of Mandarin, Arabic, Hindustani, Malay, Latin/English, Swahili, Nahuatl and Quechua would be the best way to go about it.

Yeah, Esperanto and Interlingua are basically "all (Western) European languages together", why not add some variety? Come on.

I've tried to learn Mandarin and I'm surprised at how economic it is with its words and sounds, the verbs just make sense, it flows very well. The tones are very hard to learn to someone who isn't used to it and it's very fast paced, but I find it interesting to learn because it's very distant from Indoeuropean languages (learning English as a Spanish speaker was "easier" because of that, especially because English is perhaps the most 'latinized' Germanic language because of the Normans)

I don't really thing a conlang will ever be able to impose itself as a world language, but I'm of the theory that "World English" will eventually be shaped by second-language speakers rather than those of the "Anglosphere", eventually diverging from UK or US speaking to become a whole new language. That is, of course, if it continues to be the world language, and given that the US might eventually fall from its spot as world hegemon (IMPERIO EN DECADENCIA) other language might take its place.

Of course, I'm still saying it should be Latin. It's a shame that scientific papers aren't published in Latin anymore. Even by the mid XXth century some plants were STILL being described in Botanical Latin, and I don't mean "scientific names" I mean that the description itself, all the organs and habits of the plant, were published in Latin. They don't do that anymore, but it was so cool.

[telomeke]

An excerpt:

Afrikaans → blaf-blaf; woef-woef; keff-keff (small dogs) Albanian → ham-ham Arabic → hau-hau; how-how Armenian → haf-haf Balinese → kong-kong Basque → au-au (any dog); txau-txau (small dogs); zaunk-zaunk (large dogs); jau-jau (old dogs) Belgian → wooah-wooah (if you believe Tintin’s dog Snowy is typical)Bengali → gheu-gheu; bhao-bhao Bengali → gheu-gheu; bhao-bhao Bulgarian → bau-bau; jaff-jaff Burmese → woke-woke Catalan → bau-bau; bub-bub Chinese-Cantonese → wo-wo; wow-wow; wong-wong Chinese-Mandarin → wang-wang Croatian → vau-vau Czech → haff-haff Danish → vov-vov; vuf-vuf Dutch → blaf-blaf; woef-woef; waf-waf (small dogs); kef-kef (very small dogs) English → woof-woof; ruff-ruff; arf-arf; bow-wow; yap-yap (small dogs); yip-yip (very small dogs) Esperanto → boj-boj Estonian → auh-auh; auch-auch Finnish →hau-hau; vuh-vuh; rauf-rauf French →wouaff-wouaff; ouah-ouah; whou-whou; vaf-vaf; jappe-jappe (small dog) German → wuff-wuff; vow-vow Greek → ghav-ghav Hebrew → hav-hav; haw-haw-how-how Hindi → bow-bow Hungarian → vow-vow, vau-vau Icelandic → voff-voff Indonesian → guk-guk; gong-gong Irish → amh-amh Italian → bau-bau; arf-arf Japanese → wan-wan; kian-kian Korean → mung-mung; wang-wang Kurdish → hau-hau Latvian → vau-vau Lebanese → haw-haw Lithuanian → au-au Μacedonian → av-av Malay → gong-gong Marathi → bhu-bhu; bho-bho Nigerian (Calabar area) → wai-wai Norwegian → voff-voff; boff-boff; vov-vov Persian → vogh-vogh; cut-cut; bad-bad Polish → hau-hau Portuguese → au-au Romanian → ham-ham; hau-hau Russian → gav-gav; guf-guf; hav-hav; tyav-tyav (small dogs) Serbian → av-av Sinhala → buh-buh Slovak → haf-haf; hau-hau Slovene → hov-hov Spanish → guau-guau; gua-gua; jau-jau Swedish → voff-voff; vov-vov Tagalog → ow-ow; baw-baw Tamil →wal-wal, bow-bow, lol-lol Thai → hong-hong Turkish → hev-hev; hav-hav Ukrainian → hau-hau; haf-haf; dzyau-dzyau Urdu → bow bow Vietnamese → gau-gau; wau-wau; ang-ang Welsh → wff-wff

What does a barking dog sound like in your language?

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