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Gurkha Cup 2016

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This past week I've been in London and a friend of mine, Premila, invited me to join her at the annual Gurkha Cup day celebrations out in the town of Aldershot, a military town close to Guildford. The Gurkha Cup is an all-day soccer tournament that's been organized by the Tamu Dhee Association and held every year on the Sunday of the May Day bank holiday long weekend. The event draws huge crowds. The vast majority of attendees are Gurkhas (both active and retired) and their families live around Aldershot, as well as in neighbouring towns such as Farnborough. Actress Joana Lumley was instrumental in fighting for the rights of retired Gurkha soldiers to settle in the UK , though this has not been without controversy. During the half-time show for the final game of the day between  QGS Red  and  B13 , we got to see the military band in action, as well as a demonstration of prowess with the traditional  khurkuri  knife. We didn't actually stay to wat...
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Singlish: Creole, creoloid, creolized language?

Today's post is brought to you by "ongoing problems with terminology in linguistics". As my newsfeed this week has filled up with reblogged and retweeted articles about Singlish, often the first thing that gets mentioned is that Singlish is an English-based "creole". But what exactly does the term creole mean? In many introductory linguistics textbooks, dictionaries and the Wikipedia entry (at the time of writing), the term creole (or creole language ) is mostly commonly defined as a stable natural language that has developed from a pidgin, while  pidgin  is typically defined as a simplified contact language developed to enable speakers of different languages to communicate. In other words, a pidgin is said to become a creole when children learn it as their first language and the new language develops its own set of rules and conventions - its own grammar. That means that languages which have "Pidgin" in their names, such as Hawaiian Pidgin,...
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More Singapore English words in Oxford English Dictionary

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The BBC just covered this story:  Singapore terms join Oxford English Dictionary , which is basically about how Singapore English words like wah and shiok get to join their linguistic compatriots lah  and  kiasu  in the OED, the world's "definitive record of the English language". There's even a little quiz at the bottom of article for those of you who want to flaunt your Singlish. However, I was drawn to the opening line of the article, which I think continues to perpetuate the myth of how words end up in the OED (and many dictionaries in general): Several Singaporean and Hong Kong English terms, including "wah", "shiok" and "yum cha", are now officially recognised as acceptable English. By saying that these new words are "now officially recognised as acceptable English " , the BBC article continues to perpetuate the myth that the job of the OED is to be  the  judge of what is acceptable or not acceptable English, and t...
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A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland

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So I should probably apologise / apologize for my lack of updates the past year or so. It's been pretty crazy since I started grad school - I'd have to spend many a blog post explaining all the wonderful things I've been able to do since I started in the linguistics PhD programme here at the University of Oregon. In the meantime, in the 'American' spirit of self-promotion, I thought I should mention that I finally finished revising my University of Melbourne MA thesis A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland  and got it published with Asia-Pacific Linguistics in Canberra. It's an open access ebook (print on demand), and you can download it right here at the  ANU digital collections page here . I have too many people to thank for this, especially my family who've supported me all through this crazy journey, as well as the Sumi community / my Sumi family. I'm so thankful for all the amazing people I...
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The examples linguists use

My apologies to all my readers, I just haven't had all that much time to blog since I started grad school, though I have a lot of things I'd like to blog about! (I'll be making time after finals week next week to catch up on my posting.) Thanks to the  Nom Nom Linguistics  Facebook page, I just found out about this Tumblr site called Linguistics Sample Sentences:   http://lingsamplesentences.tumblr.com/ Here you can see a selection of the weirdest / funniest / slightly more obscene examples that linguists use to illustrate various points about the grammars of other languages. Sometimes linguists need these 'weird' examples to see how a language performs a certain function. Sometimes these examples highlight how creative the speakers of a language can be. And sometimes linguists just choose the weirdest examples for comic relief. (Because talking about grammar.) In general, I'm told we sound like a violent bunch. If we're trying to study something l...
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On Not Having a Mother Tongue

At the moment, I'm TA-ing for a course called Language and Power here at the University of Oregon, and I've been recounting the following story to my students. It happened more than 10 years ago after I'd just moved from Singapore to Melbourne. I was at my university orientation, where I met a number of people, including a guy from Sweden. We got to talking, and he eventually asked me what languages I spoke. I told him that I spoke English and some Chinese (Mandarin), but that my Chinese wasn't very good. The very next thing he said to me was, "Oh, so you don't speak any language well!" Before I could recover from the shock of what he'd just said, he quickly proceeded to 'correct' my English. I remember we were talking about purchasing textbooks for our courses at a particular bookshop. I said something like: " You can get them cheap over there." He told me that it should be: "You can get them cheaply over there." ...
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Fun with tone sandhi - The solution!

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Okay, I apologise for the long delay, but finally(!), I present you with the solution to the problem set I posted in my last blog post, many months ago (see here ). (Right click the image below and select 'Open Image in New Tab'. Or  click here for an image you can magnify. )  The language is Singaporean  Teochew , as spoken by an aunt of mine who lives in Singapore. It's part of the Min Nan group of languages, but Singaporean Teochew is said to have undergone dialect leveling with Singaporean Hokkien - the two are much more mutually intelligible than their counterparts still spoken in China today. Also, although most descriptions of Teochew give 8 tones, I've only been able to find 7 contrastive ones - but there might still be an 8th one that I've missed! I know I was supposed to post this in mid-June, but a lot of stuff came up, including a move to the United States (via Australia). As some of you may already know, I've just started grad school at ...
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