Singlish is the unique type of English that's used in Singapore. The sentences above are in Singlish, so they might look and sound a little odd if you're not exposed to a lot of it.
Crucially, though, the sentences are comprehensible, even to someone who's never encountered Singlish before. They may need a little more time to figure out what the sentences are trying to say, but they will be able to get the gist of the meaning after a while since the words used are English words.
The Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) is a government-supported organisation that campaigns for the use of "standard" English in Singapore. One of the key arguments it uses to promote its aims is that if we Singaporeans use Singlish, foreigners will not be able to understand us, and we won't be competitive on the world stage, for instance in getting jobs overseas or attracting foreign investment to our shores.
Indeed, SGEM has recently been placing large advertisements in the only printed English daily broadsheet newspaper in Singapore, The Straits Times, such as the following:
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| Seen in The Straits Times page C1 on 19 June 2019. |
The implicit message behind this advertisement is that a speaker of "good/standard" English will be understood equally well in the Singapore town of Lakeside and the British city of London, whereas a speaker of "bad/broken/nonstandard" English may not.
And although this particular advertisement doesn't explicitly say so, Singlish is viewed as "nonstandard" English by SGEM. It has made many attempts in the past to stamp out the use of Singlish.
The underlying assumption, then, is that Singlish is "less useful" than "standard" English because it's not widely understood around the world. So it is of great importance that Singaporeans be versed in "standard" English because it is beneficial for them. For example, they will be able to go to London and look for a job without being hindered by communication difficulties caused by language barriers. Those who fail to master "standard" English and rely only on Singlish will lose out.
What happens if Londoners come to Singapore? Well, SGEM worries that, if we don't practise our "good" English enough, we won't be able to use it properly to communicate with the Londoners. The Londoners will have a hard time, and they will leave Singapore with a bad impression. Most horrifyingly (to the ever-pragmatic government, at least), they will take their money elsewhere. In this way, Singlish is construed as a threat to the economic wellbeing of the state.
But we must critically ask: Is it necessarily true that Singapore and Singaporeans will suffer, economically or otherwise, because of Singlish use? Are there any faults in logic behind such thinking? Is such reasoning based on unsound beliefs of how language works?
The book
In his 2018 book The Singlish Controversy, Professor Lionel Wee from the Department of English Language and Literature (ELL) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) deconstructs the debate surrounding the use of Singlish which flares up occasionally in the national media.
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| Source: Website of NUS FASS ELL. |
On one side, the government, SGEM, and opponents of Singlish want to put an end to Singlish while on the other, proponents of Singlish point out its merits and want it to remain.
Professor Wee doesn't take sides in his book, although it's clear that he isn't impressed with SGEM or its agenda, instead focusing on breaking down the linguistic factors underpinning the entire issue.
This series
My intention for this series of posts is to make the contents of the book accessible to laypersons.
By this, I don't mean that I'll leak the full text of the book here by copying and pasting chapters of the book onto this blog. That wouldn't help laypersons at all, because the book is written for an academic audience and you must have some knowledge of linguistic concepts in order to understand it.
I'm not a linguistics student, but I have enough linguistics knowledge (thanks in large part to the fantastic Dr Nala Lee and the exceptional Associate Professor Joseph Park whose lessons on sociolinguistics that I attended were comprehensive and effective) to be able to decode Professor Wee's writing and rewrite the key takeaways in a manner that everyone can understand.
And that's precisely what I'm going to do in this series of posts. There are seven chapters in the book, and I will write one post for each chapter. Each post will summarise the corresponding chapter's most important points and explain them in plain English.
Note that I won't be covering every single thing that Professor Wee writes, just the ones that are key to understanding the issue of Singlish. I'll cut out most of the dry, boring parts where Professor Wee expounds at length about linguistic theories or highlights an area where academics are in contention over some ideological construct. This means that occasionally, I might use certain technical terms loosely in a way that will make a true linguist cringe, but if it aids clarity, no harm no foul.
I also won't quote extensively from the book, except for the amusing anecdotes that Professor Wee included which I really like.
Of course, any mistakes are mine alone, and Professor Wee is not responsible. Heck, he doesn't even know this series exists.
Please don't use this series as a reference for research projects. This is not an academically rigorous text. Like I said, I'm not even a real linguistics student. I read and interpreted the book my way, which may or may not be the linguistically sound way. If you're doing a research project, read the book yourself. I will not be liable for you losing any marks.
If you want the book for yourself, perhaps to follow along with reading the original text and my chapter summaries at the same time or as source material for your research project, you can download the e-book from the NUS library database for free using your NUS login details. If you're a member of the general public and don't have access to the NUS library database, drop me a message on Twitter or Reddit and I will try to help you.
"Why are you doing this?" I hear you ask. Simple! To paraphrase Carly Rae Jepsen, I really really really really really really like the book. It's my favourite nonfiction book of all time. And I want more people to be able to enjoy it even if they don't have the prerequisite knowledge to digest it. Additionally, I am interested in the sociolinguistics of English in Singapore, so writing this series is not only fun for me, it also allows me to consolidate my own knowledge about the issue.
Interlude: My "grandmother" story
(In Singapore, the term "grandmother story" is used in a derogatory way to describe a story, often a personal recount, that is longwinded and has no important point. Hopefully this one isn't like that, but you're welcome to skip this section if you want to.)
At this juncture, I find it pertinent to tell a personal story. I used to be a so-called Grammar Nazi, someone who would go out of his way to correct people's language errors. This was probably motivated by my view of myself as an expert in English, as I had consistently won awards for the English language subject from primary through secondary school. In fact, my Primary 5 English teacher (a cheerful Sikh woman who was called Madam Kaur like almost every other Sikh female) would often consult me openly in class when difficult questions arose from the other students. So I, somewhat arrogantly I admit, thought I had a God-given right to police other people's English use.
If the purpose of education is to open one's mind and bring enlightenment, my linguistics classes at NUS certainly educated me. They inspired me to abandon my Grammar Nazi ways. Why? Famous sociolinguist Rosina Lippi-Green put it succinctly: Grammaticality does not equal communicative effectiveness.
In other words, the reason we humans developed language was to transmit information from one person to another. Language exists to enable us to tell one another stuff. When we open our mouths or raise a pen, our goal is to get our message across to someone else. Does it really matter if the language we use isn't "perfect"? If I write "I going zoo", the meaning is quite clear: I am going to the zoo. No need to be pedantic about missing conjunctions and the like.
Besides, who defines what constitutes "good/perfect/standard" language anyway? Take English for example. Very often, we look to the British for answers, because the English invented English after all, right? But there are a few problems with this.
First, the English didn't actually invent English. Nobody did. English is the product of many languages, including French, Germanic, and Latin, mixing together. So the English don't have some special claim to the language over everyone else.
Second, how do you reconcile the fact that increasingly, the world also accepts American English? A common ditty goes "I say toe-may-toe, you say toe-mah-toe", so how is it that both pronunciations of the word "tomato" can be "correct" at the same time? If we're willing to let American English also be "correct" English, then why can't Chinese English or Indian English or Russian English also be "correct" English? The line is hard to see, because it's so arbitrary that it practically doesn't exist.
Third, Lippi-Green also observed that: All spoken language changes over time. In other words, what was considered "wrong" thirty, fifty, or a hundred years ago may now be accepted. For example, Singapore was a British colony until the 1960s, so our early English influence was solely British. During my parents' time in school in the 1960s to the 1980s, "standard" English meant you had to speak in what linguists call Received Pronunciation (RP), which is the kind of English you hear when you tune in to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio station.
But by my schooling years in the 2000s and 2010s, the popularity of American media had caused many young Singaporeans to adopt a somewhat American-tinged accent. The education system no longer expected RP from students during assessments such as oral examinations, accepting alternatives such as what is labelled by linguists as General American (GenAm) or even the Singaporean accent which had had time to develop and mature over the decades, as long as it wasn't too strong.
So I realised that it's unhelpful to get hung up on little "errors" because most of the time, they don't have any negative effects whatsoever on the comprehensibility of the overall message. Being a Grammar Nazi is annoying to everyone: the Nazi gets annoyed at the litany of language errors he encounters every day, while the people who get corrected by the Nazi get annoyed because nobody enjoys being made to feel stupid. So it's better not to be a Grammar Nazi.
These days, I embrace "imperfect" English. And that includes Singlish. Singlish may not be "standard" or "accepted" in Britain or the United States, but what matters is that here in Singapore, it is widely used, it is widely accepted, and so in my eyes, it is the standard English for us.
There is a twist in this tale: My soon-to-be boss is the chairperson of SGEM. Yes, that's the organisation that opposes Singlish. How coincidental it is that he and I should both be so vested in this issue, but with diverging viewpoints.
Right, let's get started on the book...
The Introduction, which isn't a proper chapter but more of a prologue, kicks off the book by observing that Singlish is not a unique phenomenon. When English travels outside of England and comes into contact with other languages, it gets altered. So there's Singlish in Singapore, but also Manglish in Malaysia, Chinglish in China, and Spanglish in Puerto Rico.
Each of these are varieties of English. A variety is a "version" of a language that is used by a particular group of people. Singaporeans, a term which describes a group of people who live in Singapore, use the variety of English called Singlish.
Singlish has been a divisive issue, somewhat like the prickly, smelly durian fruit. You either love durian or hate it; you are either for Singlish or against it. There's hardly any middle ground in the debate.
People who are against Singlish say that its existence damages Singaporeans' ability to learn "standard" English, and having a populace that is unable to use "standard" English will be detrimental to Singapore and Singaporeans in the long run, for reasons I've already explained above.
People who are for Singlish say that we can be conversant in both "standard" English and Singlish, calling on their opponents to have more faith in Singaporeans' ability to determine which variety to use in which situation. For example, we might use "standard" English at a dinner with business partners, and Singlish at a dinner with family. This act of using different varieties at different times is called code-switching.
Having set the stage, the Introduction goes on to, well, introduce the rest of the book by outlining each chapter. I shall not cover this here because otherwise I'll end up repeating myself in subsequent posts.
But there's one more bit of text that I thought was interesting in this section, and it deals with the notion of there being such a thing as Standard Singapore English. I shall use it as a springboard to introduce you to the basics of Singapore English, so that we're all on the same page going forward.
Singapore English
This is not in the book, but first let me recap a bit of history and link it to how Singlish came to be.
Before the arrival of the British, this island was primarily inhabited by Malay villagers. The British came, and brought English with them. When the British opened a big trading port here, lots of Chinese immigrated in, and some Indians too. So there were many languages intermingling: Malay, English, and the numerous dialects of the various Chinese and Indian subgroups.
English was the language used for official communications, of course, so its vocabulary was widespread. But people don't easily forget their native languages, especially the syntax, which is how words and sentences are arranged in a particular language.
This gave rise to a curious phenomenon. People were intending to speak English, and indeed they were using English words, but they were arranging those words in the way they would have if they had been speaking their native language. For example, the sentence "You want what?" consists of English words, but is arranged according to Chinese syntax. The sentence means "What do you want?" and in Chinese it is "ni (you) yao (want) shen-me (what)".
And this is basically the essence of what Singlish is. It is English words, arranged in a special pattern that takes inspiration from a blend of Chinese, Indian, and Malay languages, and sprinkled with borrowed words from those other languages too.
The tricky part is this: Some linguists think that there is such a thing as Standard Singapore English (SSE). They contrast SSE with Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), which is just a fancy name for Singlish.
To them, Singapore English exists on a spectrum. SSE is "high-end English", like what you would use when talking to your boss. CSE is "low-end English", like what you would use at the marketplace. Most of us wouldn't spend much time at either end of this spectrum. We would instead be moving up and down as we encounter different situations in the course of a day.
But, as the book states, SSE "is spoken of with far greater tentativeness than Singlish. Many Singaporeans in fact appear unsure that Standard Singapore English actually exists, even considering such a notion to be chimerical. In contrast, the idea of Singlish has struck a much bigger cultural chord and enjoys a much more robust cultural reality, so much so that supporters of Singlish celebrate its existence even as its detractors consider it a clear and present national danger."
Why do we find it hard to believe in SSE? The book doesn't go on to deal with this question because it, too, seems to think that there's no such thing as SSE and so dismisses the issue out of hand. But I think it could be because we have been brought up by the state's education system to adopt an exonormative approach to language. We grew up learning that correct English is British English or American English. Someone else always has the answer when it comes to "standard" English. Our English here in Singapore isn't "good enough". That's why it's "impossible" for there to be a Standard Singapore English.
Linguistically, it's also very slippery to parse out what features constitute SSE and what features constitute CSE. For example, Singaporeans tend to drop the "t" and "d" sounds at the ends of words. So it's common to hear "heaven" when a Singaporean means "haven't". Is this a feature that's only present in CSE and not SSE? Whichever way the decision goes, the justification behind it will be pretty contrived. The whole exercise smacks of arbitrariness.
Rounding up
Here's what we've learned so far:
- Singlish is English vocabulary arranged in a special pattern inspired by Chinese, Indian, and Malay grammar, with some words from those languages also thrown in.
- Singlish is not unique. Whenever English travels to a place where other languages exist, new varieties of English will form when the other languages mix with English.
- Opponents of Singlish want to eradicate it because they think it hinders Singaporeans' ability to learn "standard" English. This will render them unintelligible to foreigners. Foreigners won't want to hire Singaporean workers or do business in Singapore, and this will have a negative impact on the Singapore economy.
- Proponents of Singlish rebut that Singaporeans can be good at both "standard" English and Singlish, and know when it is appropriate to use which variety.
- Some have proposed that there is a Standard Singapore English, but the idea has not gained acceptance in either the linguistics community or broader Singapore society.
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