Self-expression in different tongues

By Clarissa Oon, The Sunday Times, 1 Dec 2013

As a lover of languages, the next most fascinating thing for me after Anthony Chen's shock win at Taipei's Golden Horse Awards was watching the dazed Singapore boy make off-the-cuff, fluent thank-you speeches in Mandarin.

The 29-year-old spoke with a perceptible Taiwanese drawl, pitched slightly higher and a little more nasal and sing-song compared to Singaporean Mandarin. The latter is choppier and flatter, like its Singlish equivalent.

Watching the recent live telecast of Chinese cinema's version of the Oscars, I wondered if Chen's being au fait with the language came from his SAP school background, steady diet of arthouse Taiwanese films or Xiamen-born wife (people from Taiwan and Xiamen have Hokkien roots and a similar accent).

Whatever it was, it made one look at the typically English-speaking Singaporean director anew, and was an interesting case study in how a different language and accent might modulate one's personality.

"Deng yi xia ma (Wait a minute)," the director of Ilo Ilo implored in the dying minutes of the award show, as the background music rose to cut off his speech. The "ma" particle at the end, said with a feminine-sounding, upward drag, is quite girly and distinctively Taiwanese.

At one point, he even bowed deeply on stage as a gesture of respect to the four heavyweight directors he beat to the Best Feature Film prize - Hong Kong's Wong Kar Wai and Johnnie To, China's Jia Zhangke and Malaysian-born Tsai Ming-liang.

The bow - "ju gong" in Mandarin - would have been completely overwrought and out of place had Chen been speaking in English at the Oscars in Los Angeles.

However, as with other Confucian-influenced tongues like Japanese and Korean, the Chinese language is intimately conscious of one's place in the social order and the debt owed to one's forerunners. Speaking in Mandarin and all emotional at having beaten his cinematic heroes, Chen came across as polite and ardently respectful. The same speech in English would either have sounded weirdly self-effacing or just star-struck, even obsequious.

With globalisation and a growing number of people versed in two or more languages, there has been much discussion - scientific and otherwise - of the advantages of multilingualism. For example, it has been found that bilingual children are better at multitasking and problem-solving than their monolingual counterparts. Bilingual adults are better protected against dementia as they age.

But does one's personality also change as you toggle between languages? The question was the subject of an intriguing post last month on The Economist's cultural blog, Prospero.

Sifting through research on the subject, it identified at least two reasons why different languages might put one in a different state of mind. One is that of priming which, in psychology, refers to a non-conscious trigger of the memory. One's first language may prime the speaker to think of home and family. Other languages may be linked to work - and we know how that makes us feel - or various social and functional contexts.

I did a quick survey of friends who are proficient in more than one language. The best example of linguistic priming comes from S, a Singaporean Malay who has lived in Germany with her French husband for close to a decade. She uses German for work and "everyday nonsense", as she puts it, French with her husband and in-laws, English with her daughter and friends outside of Europe, and Malay with her own family back in Singapore.

The result is that she tends to be more formal and sometimes harsher in German. For example, she uses a lot of the conditional tense (the German equivalents of "would") and words like "may" and "can".

"But I am not averse to barking out my 'Nein!' (No!), something which, I guess, one never does with English speakers," she says.

Whereas, "I find myself more feminine in French - my voice is higher and when I speak to people, especially men outside of the familial circle, I find it easier to be a coquette. Ooh la la!".

Her most fluent language, English, has become "less fluid". And while her Malay has become rusty with disuse, "it is obviously a language that holds the most feelings and emotions for me, for example, I don't swear in Malay".

Another way in which different languages can make us feel different, as identified by The Economist, is that we are not equally good at each of them. The funny thing about this asymmetrical ability is that the language closest to your heart may actually be your weakest.

One of my friends W, a Chinese- English translator, tells me she can express "about 90 per cent" of what she wants to say in English, and "a little less than that in Mandarin". It drops to 70 per cent for Cantonese, her mother tongue, though she feels most at home speaking it.

Priming and asymmetrical ability aside, The Economist was sceptical of linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf's famous theory that each language encodes a distinct world view that in turn promotes certain kinds of behaviour.

I think there is more than a grain of truth in Whorf's idea, based on the two languages I grew up with, English and Chinese.

English is my first language, from Peranakan-inflected Singlish at home and a daily childhood diet of American TV. I also attended a convent school for the first six years of my education. There, we were taught Catholic graces and the value of self-expression.

I went from that to an SAP school - which taught Chinese as a first language - and an entirely different culture. It wasn't just about going from Winnie The Pooh school dramas to swatting a table tennis bat. It was a different universe where students not only greeted their teachers but also bowed to them, addressing them not with the prefix "Mr" or "Mrs" but the suffix "laoshi", for teacher.

In English, there are perhaps two words for an older or younger schoolmate, "senior" and "junior", elastic terms that apply in other contexts as well. In Chinese, there are four - "xuezhang", "xuedi", "xuejie", "xuemei" - specific in their reference to gender and age and reflecting one's place in the well-ordered school context.

This is not to say that one cannot be rude in Chinese, but nastiness is often indirect, in the form of sarcasm. And in a country like China, where Confucianism has been watered down by Communism and a dog-eat-dog mentality, one speaks the language loudly and more assertively than anywhere else.

I'm no bilingual chameleon, but I think there's a good case for grappling with a third language someday - uncovering a new way of looking at the world, and another side of one's self.