Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
Welcome to Talking to Grandma, a weekly podcast that elevates stories, science, and strategies to help you raise and teach multilingual and bilingual children. I’m your host, Dr. Veronica Benavides, founder and CEO of Bilingual Generation, an organization that helps children with bilingualism in their bones stay connected to their heritage languages and cultures. I am also a Harvard-educated doctora who has experienced losing, recovering, and passing on my heritage language to my children. Whether you are a parent, grandparent, teacher, researcher, school leader, or simply someone interested in the topics of language learning and language preservation, this podcast is for you. Through interviews with amazing guests and solo episodes, you will find the resources, guidance, and strategies needed to support you in your journey. Let’s get started!

Today we hear from Zara child, a 17-year-old student and the author of a Singaporean Hokkien language learning book. Although her first language was Mandarin Chinese, and she has formally studied French and English, it is Singaporean Hokkien that has captured her imagination.

Zara Child
When I was 14, I discovered that this whole different language existed that I had never heard of before. And my parents had never talked to me about it. I didn't know it was spoken in my family. So this was a total shock to me and I had been raised speaking Mandarin so I really thought that was like my family's language but it turns out it wasn't. So I eventually learned that Hokkien was not only my grandparents mother tongue on my Singaporean family side, but also a language my mother spoke growing up.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
Through her work, she strives to protect linguistic diversity. Stick around to hear Zara’s inspiring story and hear about the book she created, Jiak Ba Beh? A Taste of Singaporean Hokkien: An Introduction to Spoken Singaporean Hokkien. Lets get into it! Welcome to the show Zara. We're so excited to have you here and really, really pumped to dig more into your story and more into the book, which we'll talk about a little bit later on. But we generally like to start the conversation with learning more about you and your experiences with language loss or preservation. So can you start there?

Zara Child
Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me. So I think I really share the story that a lot of kids in the US do, where you kind of grew up in a multilingual household but then kind of as you get older and go to school, you start to lose those heritage languages. So for me those heritage languages started off as being Mandarin Chinese and French with my Hokkien family, the Chinese with, with my Singaporean family. But I think that my story with language preservation gets kind of more interesting and it's more deeply rooted in my story with Hokkien and When I was 14, I discovered that this whole different language existed that I had never heard of before. And my parents had never talked to me about it. I didn't know it was spoken in my family. So this was a total shock to me and I had been raised speaking Mandarin so I really thought that was like my family's language but it turns out it wasn't. So I eventually learned that Hokkien was not only my grandparents mother tongue on my Singaporean family side, but also a language my mother spoke growing up. I remember my first thought was like, How did I not know this language existed? That is spoken in my family. And so I did some research and I learned that Singaporean Hokkien and most dialects of Chinese kind of faced a history of linguistic repression in Singapore. So that's when I really started to dive into language preservation and trying to learn the language itself.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
That's amazing. Can you tell us a little bit more about like, how you found out at 14. Was it like by accident or were you researching it and came across like what brought you to that realization?

Zara Child
So it was at the dinner table and my mom had cracked like a joke in Hokkien over the table and I remember thinking to myself, like God, did my Mandarin get this bad that I didn't understand a single word and then I asked her and she told me that it was Hokkien and I was like, completely shocked because I had never even heard of language.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
And that kind of started at all were you then learned about it? So what did you learn about the history of linguistic oppression? And like, who were the people that spoke Hokkien and why was it a language that then started to be viewed as maybe less prestigious or less valuable as Mandarin Chinese dialects

Zara Child
So Chinese like Hokkien and there's quite a few of them. The main ones in Singapore are Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese, those dialects. They're considered dialects, but they're really more their own languages and many linguists would agree on that. They were spoken by the majority of the Chinese Singaporean population in Singapore until the "Speak Mandarin" campaign which was launched in the late 70s. And it encouraged halting speaking dialects in favor of Chinese Mandarin Chinese and English because they had more international power and kind of to more to make Singaporeans more competitive in the economy and in business. So they kind of halted speaking those languages and they were discouraged from speaking in schools. And there was also stopping of airing Hokkien in and other dialects on radio broadcasts and television shows and that kind of not only isolated the elderly population that spoke the language, but it also stopped new native speakers from being created. So that created a language barrier between the younger generation and the older generation between grandparents and grandchildren, which was really sad.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
Did you ever talk to your mom about this like why she decided not to speak Hokkien and to you or to share more that part of her identity and did it intersect with this history that you're sharing with us now?

Zara Child
Yeah, so when I first asked her about it, she told me that she really spoke it with her grandparents and at home because at school she was encouraged to speak Mandarin and English. She didn't really take that language home to her parents. So she spoke Mandarin with her parents but when it came to her grandmother who spoke Hokkien and she spoke Hokkien with her grandmother, but she was discouraged from speaking in at school, so she passed on Mandarin to me.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
We here at bilingual generation talk a lot about like the intersection of language and identity. And I'm curious to know like as you learned about this language that is part of your family that's a part of your heritage, if that shifted your sense of identity in any way. And if so, how?

Zara Child
I think definitely it did, because I kind of grew up thinking that I was speaking Mandarin Chinese and that was the only language on my Singaporean side of the family. So I mean, that's the language that is for the most part spoken by Chinese people and Chinese Singaporeans around the globe. So when I learned this I really felt like I had been missing out on this piece of my identity. Like this one piece of my culture had been slipping away from me and I had not even realized it.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
So since you've started kind of digging more into this piece of your identity, what do you feel like has changed for you or kind of different understandings that you have about yourself and your identity?

Zara Child
I think I definitely I'm, like, more interested in like the history of languages in Singapore. And I kind of like has pushed me to realize how diverse languages can be and especially in like, not just Singapore, but also in China. Like there's so much language diversity that is just not spoken of, and we don't really hear of so that's something I've become more interested in. And kind of also more interested in learning all the different languages from the different parts of my family because there's a lot of different languages both on both sides of my family. And I think I've kind of been more interested in learning all of those languages opposed to just the ones that are quote unquote useful like English and French and you know, ones that are considered kind of more useful in the business world. So I value that part of the cultural aspect of language more now.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
Yeah, it's amazing. Have you gotten your family involved and kind of this journey of reclaiming re learning your heritage languages

Zara Child
Definitely. Yes. I think if you ask anyone in my family, they would tell you that I'm always asking like, can we please speak Mandarin today? Can we please speak? Definitely. Yeah. And my mom, too. She speaks she speaks Hokkien and she's spoken as a child. So for me, anytime I had a question I'd be bouncing to her room like asking her how to say something and especially Singaporean Hokkien and it's kind of more unique. I mean, every like dialect is unique, but Hokkien and is very influenced by the other languages in Singapore and like the Malaysian population, and all of the other diverse aspects of Singapore. So there's really like a unique way Hokkien is spoken in Singapore compared to Taiwan or China. So I've been asking her about kind of the different ways that are spoken. And I think we just speak languages other than English more now that I've become interested in this.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
I'm thinking about our audience who are mostly parents and also grandparents and educators, of children, multilingual children, and children who you know, they want to be multilingual. And a lot of what we hear from our folks that we work with is in the US how difficult it can be to sustain the child's interest in learning another language or developing their heritage language. Maybe it's easier when they're at home and they're three and four but once they get in school and the English monolingual mainstream and then they get to middle school, and then they get to high school and so here we have used our I was 17 years old and from 14 to 17 You kind of jumped into this language discovery and preservation process. So what was necessary for you to have this mindset, our this kind of love for learning languages and what can educators and parents kind of take from that or learn from that?

Zara Child
So I think I definitely experienced that same feeling where like, the second I went to school, I was like, I really need to only speak English and that was the only language that I was interested in. Actually, my mom has told me that I would like lay on the floor until I would not speak Mandarin at all. So I was pretty much trying to disconnect myself from any aspect of my linguistic heritage that was not English. So that eventually led me to lose both my understanding of French and Mandarin so essentially, I was cut off from a lot of relationships in my family. I think something that I grew to value as I got older, was being able to hear the stories from my grandparents. So when I didn't speak French, my broken French was not letting me hear any of the stories about my grandmother and her childhood in Haiti, or anything from my Singaporean grandmother who, you know, she lives in Singapore and she has so many interesting stories. So I mean, honestly, I've never stopped wondering what stories I could have been told. So I think kind of the language barrier is what pushed me but I think that's something that is kind of helpful for getting your kid interested in the language. Or, like, you know, getting gaining confidence and being able to like teach that language even if you're not perfect at it is realizing like how messy language learning is and how messy language preservation is. You don't have to be perfectly fluent and your kid doesn't have to be perfectly fluent either. So even just learning one more phrase or one more word, if you think about that as kind of a step towards connection and a step towards culture, then I think that really helps.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
Beautiful I could not have said that better myself. That's so true to think these are everything that and you know, I really, it's so important to know that like connection and culture are the core of heritage language preservation, because you know, the grammar will come the vocabulary will come the mastery of the mechanics of the language will come but if you don't have the motivation if you don't have the, the connection to it, or any you know, groundedness in a why this is important, then it's very difficult for any of the other stuff, language learning stuff to come after that. So thank you so much for for sharing that. So Zara, you have a book called Jiak Ba Beh? A Taste of Singaporean Hokkien: An Introduction to Spoken Singaporean Hokkien, can you tell us a little bit about this book and what inspired you to create it?

Zara Child
Yeah, of course. So I kind of think of it as a little bit of a Hokkien primer so it's a very introductory book to spoken Singaporean Hokkien and and I say spoken because Hokkien does have written characters like Mandarin Chinese, but spoken, teaching it in a way that helps people speak makes it easier for people who don't read characters perfectly, or who aren't amazing at reading Mandarin characters, which is a very difficult task to master. So this book kind of uses a combination almost of the Mandarin romanization system, which is clean and English letters and the addition of a glottal stop to kind of intuitively teach simpler Singaporean Hokkien and so that people can learn it even though there's not a lot of formal resources for learning Hokkien.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
That's amazing. So how did you come up with this method? Were you taught this method or did you learn this method somewhere? What inspired you to use this method to write the book?

Zara Child
So for me something that because I grew up speaking Mandarin at home, but I didn't formally study it in like a school setting. So I don't have a ton of background on on written Chinese characters, and hockey and is really more of a spoken language because in Singapore, it's it's more of a colloquial language. So it's not formally used for any documents. And the main purpose for of Hokkien is just speaking to communicate with your grandparents or with elderly community. So I kind of recognized that. It was not important to me that I would be doing the characters and I applaud anyone out there who is trying to preserve the characters because I can never do that. But for me, I also had to realize that a lot of Singaporean youth are not very comfortable with characters and I can't say that for all of them. But the Singaporeans that I've met in the US don't all perfectly know characters, and an easier way to learn is with Romanization and that's the way that I was taught by my hotkey and teacher, Eugene Lee, who founded learndialect.sg. He taught me in that way. So I decided to just take what he taught me, which I thought was pretty intuitive. And kind of adjusted a little bit, which makes it easier for other people to learn, even if they don't perfectly read Mandarin characters. And even if they don't even know how to read romanization for Mandarin Chinese,

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
that's really great. And I think it's also important to elevate the fact that like, we all have different relationships to our heritage language, and some people may be able to read and write it and have a different kind of fluency and other people may be able to speak it more fluently. And so it's really whatever your relationship to your heritage language is better than no relationship to your heritage language. So it's really wonderful that you're providing this entry point into the hockey language for others who want to learn this way as well. Also have a resource on your website, which we will link in the show notes that includes a playlist of hockey, music and music can be a great resource for people looking to reclaim and learn their heritage language. So was it difficult to come up with this playlist? Is there a large amount of hockey music out there or was it difficult for you to compile this list?

Speaker 1
I think that's a bit of a mix of both because the titles of those songs are in characters for me it was not super easy to distinguish whether it was Hokkien and from the song titles, but when I listened to it, I could tell the difference between the languages Mandarin and Hokkien and there is some Hokkien music but I would say it's kind of more than music from the older generation. I haven't found pretty much any, like younger Hokkien music. So I don't think there's a lot of Hokkien music being produced. But I think that music from the past is really helpful, especially because it's kind of what I heard my grandparents listening to or singing karaoke too. So I think there's a lot of culture in that generation's music. But for me, the playlist was kind of when I was learning, I like to hear it because it almost transported me to Singapore made me feel like I was learning a lot too. And once I started recognizing words, that was really rewarding. So I wanted other people to be able to do that.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
Yes, that's great. And hopefully maybe we have some folks listening and inspired who may start producing new generations of hockey music and keeping that alive. what's some advice that you would give someone who's looking to find a community or who's trying to begin the process of preserving their heritage language, given your experience and your journey what advice would you give them?

Speaker 1
I think, first of all, you need to come to terms with the fact that you are not going to be able to preserve an entire language by yourself. Language preservation seems like this huge daunting task that is reserved for people who fluently speak the language and who are trained linguists and studied for numerous years. But you don't need that in language preservation. All you really need is to tap into the elderly community, which usually is where the native speakers are, and is usually where the people who want to speak about their language are. So I'd say advice is, Be easy on yourself. Don't take on too much. Try to preserve an introductory level. And if that's already been done, then maybe you can take it a step further and do a different kind of subject start kind of slow and just tap into that elderly community because it's kind of like a goldmine if I'm being honest, they know the language best and so if you listen to them, you can record them, and you can kind of sound it out if there isn't any existing Romanization.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
I love the elevation of the wisdom of our elders, and how important they are in language preservation and also cultural preservation. I'm wondering Zara, from your time with elders in this language preservation process. What are some things that you've learned?

Zara Child
I've definitely learned a lot about Singapore's history. Um, I think the history of dialects is not something that I had really heard before. It's definitely Singapore's presence in like United States history classes is definitely very minimal if there's any representation at all. So I definitely learned a lot about the history but also, I think I learned more about kind of how people speak colloquially. So because Singapore is so diverse, a lot of different communities and languages influence Singaporean hotkey. And so I kind of learned more about how the language is spoken specifically in Singapore, and how specific words are said that reflect other languages of different groups in Singapore.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
Thank you so much, Sarah, for sharing that wisdom with us and just your whole journey. I'm so inspired by everything that you've done and I hope our listeners are too as we close out the always like to end with a question. What is bringing you joy these days?

Zara Child
So much I think seeing that there's a lot of younger people that are more interested in preserving their language, or in learning their heritage languages. That really brings me joy, because I think we all came from a place or most of us came from a place where at first we didn't want to get into that and we didn't want to learn those heritage languages, but kind of as we grew older became to appreciate that kind of culture. So I think that's really amazing that so many people are starting to tap into this part of their culture. And I also it brings me joy that there's organizations like this that are actually passionate about language preservation because all of the hard work and consistent effort from language preservation is kindly being seen. As worth it. So I think that's amazing. I think language has kind of a key to connection and diversity. And I think more people are starting to protect that and I love that.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
Thank you so much, Sarah. I really appreciate you again for the time for all the work that you're doing and for being a part of this larger movement as he said, of language. Preservation, it really takes an intergenerational effort. So thank you everything that you've done, and for bringing so much inspiration to the space today.

Zara Child
Thank you for having me.

Host, Dr. Veronica Benavides
Thank you so much for tuning in today! If you liked what you heard, take a minute to share this podcast with a friend or colleague. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review on your favorite podcast platform. Your ratings and reviews help us keep the podcast lights on! We can’t do this without your support. Every subscription, share, follow, download, and review makes a big difference and helps others find our show. Also, we love hearing from you! Tell us what you think of the podcast. Email us at hello@bilingualgeneration.com. You can also slide into our DMs on Instagram, @talkingtograndma. If you are interested in learning more about our workshops and curricular tools for schools serving multilingual and emerging multilingual students, visit our website at www.bilingualgeneration.com or write us at hello@bilingualgeneration.com. Talking to Grandma is owned by Bilingual Generation. Rebecca De Leon is our editor and producer. The artwork for Talking to Grandma was created by Nansi Guevara. And I’m your host, Dr. Veronica Benavides. See you next episode!