Chatting with a couple of mums this morning, I was bemused by how I've slid almost effortlessly into the typical Aussie conversation pattern.
"Hi, how are you?"
"Good!" (Aussies are never just fine, they're good)
"How was Queensland?"
"Yeah it was nice. We haven't been on a holiday for a while, so it was nice to get away with the kids. Now I'm getting back into the swing of things again (groan), then one more week of school and we get a two-week break. (Big Smiles)"
I love how as adults, it's easy to switch accents and conversational styles. With my Singapore Club friends, I speak Singlish like I've never left Sg, and we all understand each other perfectly. Then when an Aussie joins in, we automatically switch back to our Aussie accents.
I've noticed that this ability seems to be exclusive to adults. My kids both speak with an Aussie accent, especially Jordanne, who was born here. When they speak Mandarin, they sound like angmohs trying to learn Chinese, and I have to keep correcting their accents to get them to pronounce words with the 北京腔 and not like the Chinese As A Second Language learners that they are.
1 comment:
I can so relate to that!
There was once, at my MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) group, I shared on differences in my home country and Australia and used Singlish for my sharing. All the Asians understood me perfectly and the caucasians who had never heard of Singlish were concentrating really hard trying to understand!
Understand what you mean by speaking children speaking Mandarin strangely. We speak Mandarin to our daughter but she still responds in English, even though she's only 2.5 yrs old!
Hope to get that mother tongue instilled in our children!
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