LIFT Vlog Episode 24: The Hokkien Edition

Hi everyone! I had great fun making this video - my colleague Stephanie is originally from Xiamen (though she moved to Shanghai as a child) but speaks authentic Xiamen-Amoy Hokkien (Ay'mng Ueh) - this is the very purest form of Hokkien, my mother tongue. I speak Southern-Malaysian/Singaporean Hokkien (the version which is spoken from around Malacca, down to Johor, Singapore and the Riau islands) which is heavily influenced by Malay along with other languages like English, Teochew and Cantonese. When I first realized that Stephanie speaks Hokkien as well, it occurred to me that we had a language that only the two of us spoke in a work environment where many people spoke either English, Mandarin or both - so it was a way for us to communicate without anyone else understanding us.

However, did we understand each other? Well, it was a struggle admittedly given the number of loanwords from Malay in my version of Hokkien. We would have to resort to English or Mandarin sometimes as there wasn't enough mutual intelligibility - but still, it was fun to try. Of course, the list of words and sentences we covered in this video is by no means exhaustive - it was just some of the words that cropped up in our conversations that I covered here and I focused on the words which are different, rather than the words which are similar (that would make a far less interesting video). But hey, I hope from the longer sentences will give you an idea of where the similarities and differences are. This video could have been a lot longer, we could have gone on for ages... Stephanie said she understood about 70% of my Hokkien but I think I understood only about 50% of hers - but still, it was enough for us to converse!

In Xiamen, the loanwords would usually come from Mandarin whilst in Singapore, the loanwords would often come from Malay or English but increasingly from Mandarin as well - I find Singaporean Hokkien very interesting as it is a Creole rather than a pure form of a language and we should always try to keep Hokkien alive. Do let me know what you think, please leave a comment below. Thank you so much for reading and watching my blog/vlog, kum siah!