Two voices

I’ve just listened to a podcast by Yang-May Ooi, a Malaysian-born writer and lawyer who lives in the UK. The podcast, Two Voices, was, well, on Yang-May’s two voices.

Yang-May talks about having a “split personality”, being able to lapse into Malaysian English whenever she’s with her family or Malaysian friends, and speaking in (to me) very proper English when she’s at work or with British friends. Yang-May considers that she has two distinct personalities – an English one (more formal) and a Malaysian one (more casual). Although I happily move from Malaysian to Australian English depending on who I’m with, I’ve never thought of it that way – how does my Australian personality differ from my Malaysian one?

Yang-May has lived in the UK for years, and talks of how she gradually developed her English voice by being around English people and wanting to fit in, as a teenager. I can really relate to this, having gone through the same thing myself when we arrived in Perth (funny how teenagers want to be the same while wanting to be different).

She also says that for her it has been important to develop her English voice: “Because of the way I speak, people hear who I am, I can express myself”. Because she will always look different, sounding like everyone else means they often then forget this difference. Yang-May observes that people from Germany or France who might speak with strong accents or use German or French language structures sometimes find it more difficult to fit in because their speech continues to mark them as being different. If you speak with the local accent and use the local idioms, you fit in, because you sound the same. (I take great pleasure in startling people, who expect me to not speak English at all, by saying something completely idiomatic and slang-ridden. Then I tell them my Germanic-sounding Dutch name and confuse them even more. Yes, simple pleasures…)

At home I don’t know how I sound. I know I am very comfortable around M because I will happily subject him to Malaysian English when the situation fits.

This post is lateish this morning because I have the day off and have been dawdling. It’s so nice to have the morning off to sit around drinking cups of tea and listening to music (J.S. Bach arias). I’ve been watching the birds outside my window – there’s a bush they seem to like to sit in. They swoop past then dive into the bush, sitting there for some seconds chirping loudly at each other before flying out and repeating the whole process again. I think I need to put up a bird bath and feeder for them. Baubles the Cat has just scared the birds off by going and basking in the sunshine right next to the bush.