My journey first started with Telugu ( తెలుగు ), my dad’s mother tongue, spoken in Hyderabad. With my paternal aunts and family fawning over the first female–and still the only–child. instead of growing up with one, two three, I grew up with ఒకటి, రెండు, మూడు. Being born in Singapore to an Indian family meant that Telugu wouldn’t exactly get me as far communication wise. So English was introduced along with Hindi, as an ode to the language both my parents speak and as national duty to their country.
My condo and kindergarten has mainly Asian people meaning caucasian people were a rare sight which accents and traditions different than ours. Bollywood movies were more familiar and watched than the occasional Hollywood movie while Hollywood tv shows were, for some reason, banned to me by my mum so my exposure to the “outer world” really was limited to India and Singapore, but I didn’t mind.
Since I learned to speak all the way up until grade 3, I sported a patriotic Singaporean-Indian accent thanks to my Singaporean teachers, friends, and family.
When I arrived at UWC, I only then saw a wide variety of ethnicities, but not culture. I would see Indians who weren’t Indian and had no connection to their culture and tried to disassociate themselves from their background. Slowly, I did too. Enter mid-grade 3, I speak like everyone else and less like me. The identity that I was once so proud and fond off soon started to fade away. In addition, my teachers were mainly Australian or British, making me speak with a somewhat American accent minus the ay sound in a word like mayn, or claess.
Grade 5. Epic Arts came on their annual trip to UWC and for the first time and we got to interact with them. The whole class sat down with the two Epic Arts people – whose name I now forget – and they assign everyone a sign name. I still remember mine. It was the letter R being shaken while moving it down. Fascinated by how a sign name was assigned to represent a person, I searched up the alphabet. I remember my table partner (who left later that year) teaching our k1 buddies the alphabet in Sign Language. That was the tipping point in which I decided to learn the whole language and with a few breaks, I’ve now been learning ASL though youtube and an online school for the past 4 years.
Often times when practicing for a Spanish test, I would learn the sign and the name in Spanish at the same time. I still do and during oral exams, I’ll be seen doing “weird motions” with my hands as I speak, giving me the weird habit of fingerspelling or signing alongside conversations
It remained that way until grade 6 when all of a sudden Akshay Kumar, one of Bollywood’s esteem actor, arrived at our school. Suddenly the hidden Bollywood obsession I had seemed to make me different and more unique and something to be proud of. Slowly, my connection to my culture started to grow back again. I didn’t fight or suppress the accent. I embraced what was special to me.
My idiolect consists of a mix of Singlish words (mainly the word aiyoh at any time of even the smallest inconvenience), fandom words (e.g – I ship them!, what a cinnamon roll, head-canon, au (alternate universe), fan-fiction), and ‘stan’ twitter language (e.g – shister / sister sometimes combined or left alone with shook, snapped (or any word starting with s), stan, skinny legend, sis, tea, icon, skinnier than Mariah, shade).
My accent changes at school, becoming more American and at home, it flops back into an Indian-Singaporean accent
I got the Singlish words by being around Singaporeans and watching Singaporean tv shows a lot. The fandom words come from me being a geek and (loving Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Hamilton, The selection and a bunch more other fandoms). The ‘stan’ twitter language mainly came from scrolling through Instagram and seeing this new way of communicating and decided to try it out ironically but that ended up backfiring as now it’s stuck with me.
My texting idiolect is a whole different thing. My texting comprises of the use of no capital letters, commas in the place of ellipses, the use of sksksksksk when actual words can’t represent what you’re feeling, a combination of capital and lower case letters to MoCk SoMeThInG along with ‘1!!11!1!’. If I’m trying to indicate something important, there will be grADUAL capital letters and if I’m trying to emphasize something, the letters will be s p a ce d out.
how does english mis/represent and in/exclude?
English brings together people who can speak it or who want to learn how to speak it. English, even though it’s considered the global language, can indicate if someone is from an english speaking place and /or if english is their first language by their accent/dialect, grammar and idiolect.
Who owns English? As times advance, our dependability and time on social media increases, random people are becoming more influential as singers and authors who, in my opinion, used to “own” English. As more concepts get introduced, more words get introduced. For example, as feminism become very popular and almost a trend, the word “woke” was introduced as ‘to be knowledgeable about real life issues. In that sense, people who are not only influential but has contact with large masses of people, the more likely they are to “own” English. Another example is previously people would text ‘I don’t {…}’ or but as one person starting replacing “I don’t’ with ‘ion’, more people started using ‘ion’ while texting. So in conclusion, who “owns” English? People with influence and it changes due to new concepts and ideas becoming more relevant.