In Burmese you rarely call an older person by their name alone. You slot in a title that marks your place beside them — where they sit in the family, roughly how old they are, whether you owe them deference. It is a small formality, but everyone reads it instantly. Use the wrong one and the whole room quietly knows.
Ko and Ma precede the names of people a bit older than you, the way some people say bro or sis but with strict rules about age. U and Daw sit in front of the names of older people and total strangers you want to treat with respect. None of it is fixed forever — you graduate from Ko to U for the same person as you get older, which is a polite way for everyone to pretend no one is ageing.
Inside a family it is simpler and warmer. You call older relatives not by name but by their role — older brother, older sister, aunt on the mother's side. It does not matter how many cousins you have. The word tells you exactly how you are related, and it tells your cousin what you are to them. It is a whole filing system built into daily speech.
Abroad, the system gets stretchy. The kids grow up hearing it in the kitchen and abandoning it in the schoolyard, where everyone is simply a name. At family gatherings you hear the adults calling each other by the old titles and the young ones saying them slightly wrong, or dropping them entirely with a shrug. It is not disrespect. It is just that English has no slot for it, and Singapore English definitely does not.
What survives is the closest circle. My cousins and I still call our elders by the right words without thinking, because those words are the ones that say we belong to each other. The rest can fray. The titles that still matter are the ones that mean you are family, and those are surprisingly hard to lose.