This post is my contribution to the October 2024 IndieWeb Carnival, themed "Multilingualism in a Global Web" and hosted by Riccardo. This is also my first time participating in the IndieWeb Carnival. I am motivated to participate because my daily life is affected by multiple languages.
As an ethnic Chinese person born and raised, and still lives in Malaysia, multilingualism is an integral part of my everyday life since childhood, both online and offline. My native language is Mandarin Chinese, but I was raised to be Mandarin/English bilingual, and I can speak Cantonese and Malay as well.
My parents made the decision to raise my younger brother and I to be Mandarin/English bilingual, because they recognise the importance of learning Mandarin to connect with our Chinese roots and culture, and learning English, which is considered the primary global language, for opening us up for more opportunities in life. This upbringing was carried out in our household by encouraging my brother and I to communicate with our mother in Mandarin and our father in English, so we could build a solid foundation in both languages since childhood.
As part of this upbringing, my brother and I attended a kindergarten that mainly taught in English but also had Chinese classes, then a Chinese primary school and an English private secondary school. While my brother and I ended up attending different universities, both the universities we attended primarily used English.
The official language of Malaysia is Malay, which is also the native language of the majority Malay ethnic group, thus Malay is a compulsory subject in primary and secondary school education. I received good grades in Malay in school, but after graduating from secondary school, my opportunities to practice and speak Malay had reduced significantly, especially compared to Mandarin and English, so while I can still speak Malay, I am not as fluent in it as Mandarin and English.
While English is not the official language in Malaysia, it is widely used in Malaysia to the extent English is also a compulsory subject in primary and secondary school education. As a result, Chinese primary schools in Malaysia mandate students to learn three languages: Mandarin, Malay and English.
It is worth noting that because Malaysia is a former British colony, in formal settings including education, Malaysian English follows British English spelling and grammar conventions. However, due to the widespread influence of American media and pop culture, and the fact that most computer software used in Malaysia sets American English as the default language, American English is also understood and used in Malaysia.
As for Chinese language's writing system in Malaysia, Simplified Chinese is taught in school, but during my parents' student era in the 60s and 70s, Traditional Chinese was taught instead. That said, since Traditional Chinese is still used often in Malaysia, and Taiwan and Hong Kong media has widespread influence among Malaysian Chinese, younger generations have no problem with reading Traditional Chinese either.
Most Malaysian Chinese, myself included, are descendants of Southern Chinese immigrants from different ethnic subgroups including Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Hainanese and more. As a result, a diverse array of Chinese dialects are spoken in Malaysia. I recommend watching Learn Penang Hokkien's video, "Why are different Chinese languages spoken in different Malaysian cities?", to learn about the interesting phenomenon of different Chinese languages spoken in different parts of Malaysia.
My paternal family is Cantonese while my maternal family is Hokkien, though my mother also speaks Cantonese, and in fact, my parents communicate with each other in Cantonese primarily. I learned Cantonese through listening to conversations between my parents and paternal relatives, watching a lot of Hong Kong television shows during secondary school and listening to Cantonese music, especially Sam Hui's, who is also my father's favourite singer. By contrast, I am unable to speak Hokkien due to not being exposed to the language as much as Cantonese, especially since I do not meet my maternal relatives as often as my paternal relatives.
I had learned to use computer and the internet since I was a kindergartener, and realised that English is the lingua franca of the World Wide Web. However, in the 2000s, since I discovered the concept of blogs through a Malaysian Chinese magazine for secondary school students, the early days of my history with blogs and blogging began with Mandarin: I wrote blog posts in Mandarin, and read and followed blogs mostly by Malaysian Chinese and Taiwanese bloggers. In the late 2000s, I joined Baidu Tieba, which was the main source of my exposure to internet culture in mainland China, and was active there until I discovered and joined Tumblr in 2011.
Since joining Tumblr in 2011, Tumblr became the social media platform I was most active on for the longest time. Consequently, English became the language I use on the internet the most. I still speak and type in Mandarin on a daily basis, because I still live with my parents and every company I have worked for throughout my career, including my current company, is run by Chinese people, with Mandarin being the most commonly spoken language in the workplace. However, I have been using English the most in my long form writings on the internet since the 2010s.
In recent months, I began to realise that I need to find ways to continue practising writing in Mandarin. Therefore, I decided to journal in Mandarin since the start of 2024, and recently I decided to start this new personal blog by writing in both English and Simplified Chinese. Galaxy Garden also marked my first time building a multilingual website, so setting up this blog has been quite a learning experience on the technical side too.
I am proud to be multilingual, and I am grateful that my life and upbringing as a Chinese person in Malaysia actively encourages me to be multilingual. Learning multiple languages has allowed me to learn about different cultures, including different Chinese cultures, broaden my horizon, and connect with more people from different parts of the world.
UPDATE, 2 November 2024:
Riccardo has written a round-up article for the October 2024 IndieWeb Carnival, which compiles all submissions with short commentaries. Here is Riccardo 's comment on my entry:
Thank you, Helen, for posting from the part of the world I know less about. If my old friend Hai Xin read my blog, I would tell him to check the Chinese version.
Galaxy Garden also marked my first time building a multilingual website, so setting up this blog has been quite a learning experience on the technical side too.
I, too, noticed that maintaining a multi-language site isn’t trivial; in addition, many site generators don’t help at all, or at most provide some rudimentary tool.
You are welcome, Riccardo. I am pleased to hear that you found my article interesting. As a Malaysian Chinese person who was raised to be multilingual, I have a lot to say about languages and multilingualism, so I wrote this article and submitted it to the October 2024 IndieWeb Carnival to offer my own perspective on the subject.
I recommend checking out and reading the other submitted articles included in Riccardo's round-up article as well. It is interesting to learn about the different points of view on multilingualism from people across the globe!
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