Ideology... what??
Let's think of the simplest kind of debate. There is an issue being discussed, and two opposing camps. It seems odd to say that the two camps actually agree on certain things during a debate. After all, what makes a debate a debate is that there is disagreement over the issue. But in most public debates, there is a set of assumptions that both sides share, and these assumptions usually go unquestioned and are taken for granted as obvious truth. That's the idea of ideology pooling.
For example, when Halimah Yacob became President of Singapore after an uncontested election which had been reserved for Malay candidates, there was much public debate over her right to be called a Malay given that her father is Indian while her mother is Malay. Detractors pointed out that she is not "pure" Malay so she should not have been allowed to run in the election, while others who defended her insisted that she is "Malay enough". The debate was framed as revolving around the "dividing lines" between the Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others (CMIO) racial categories: in the case of someone with mixed parentage, which category does this person fall into?
In Singapore, citizens are slotted into one of these four categories. It has been this way for as long as anyone can remember. So Singaporeans take it for granted that race can only be defined by the CMIO model. But race is practised differently elsewhere. Countries in the West are experimenting with elective race, in which people can self-identify as belonging to a particular race. The CMIO model is not the be-all and end-all of race. But it is seen in that way by Singaporeans discussing race, regardless of their stand on the particular issue being discussed. This sets boundaries on the course of debates. If Singaporeans accounted for the possibility of elective race, for example, the debate over the legitimacy of Halimah's presidential bid will look very different from what it is today.
Ideology pooling is not a bad or good thing. It's just something we need to keep in mind when debating issues. We need to ask ourselves: Are there any truths we are holding to be self-evident? If so, are these "truths" really true?
In the case of the Singlish controversy, some of the "truths" are based on faulty logic or false "facts". They also prevent the debate from progressing. Indeed, the points for and against Singlish that are brought up today are the same ones that were brought up when the debate first erupted twenty-odd years ago.
Now, we will look at these shared assumptions one-by-one.
Assumption 1: It's possible to use only Singlish for entire interactions
Can you hold an entire conversation, let's say chatting with your friend for fifteen minutes, using only Singlish? Meaning, you must not switch into "standard" English a single time.
Both pro- and anti-Singlish camps seem to think it's possible to do something like that. The government, through its anti-Singlish messages, has painted the picture of a speaker who speaks Singlish and nothing else, because he is incapable of switching into "standard" English. According to the government, there are such people in Singapore. They use this as a justification to criticise the more well-educated Singaporeans who still use Singlish occasionally despite being able to use "standard" English. By creating an environment in which Singlish is present and accepted, these better-off speakers are hurting their Singlish-only counterparts because these Singlish-only speakers will not have a chance to learn and practise "standard/good" English. They will be cursed with being only able to speak Singlish forever, and won't be able to reap the economic benefits that come with a command of "proper" English, such as higher-paid jobs.
Defenders of Singlish don't question the existence of speakers who only can speak Singlish. Instead, they say that the pro-Singlish movement is morally superior because they are encouraging these Singlish-only speakers to speak up despite not using "proper" English, unlike the government which is putting these people down. Another common argument this camp uses is that Singaporeans know when to use Singlish and when not to. They would probably use Singlish when in the company of only fellow Singaporeans, and "standard" English when foreigners are present. Note that for this argument to hold water, there has to be a clearly defined dividing line between Singlish and "standard" English, so that speakers can switch from one to the other. It's as if Singlish and "standard" English are totally different languages.
When languages are distinct, they are easier to differentiate. But Singlish and "standard" English are not distinct. This is because Singlish is not fully developed as a language of its own. Its grammar is not different enough from English, so it can be very hard to tell if certain utterances are made in Singlish or English. On a larger scale, it is almost impossible to imagine a scenario where Singlish is used as the sole language in an interaction. At some point, it is likely that a sentence or two will appear to follow the grammatical rules of English. For example, the sentence "I will be there" is grammatical in English and has no alternative in Singlish, so a Singlish speaker will also say "I will be there" in the appropriate context and when he does so, he can be said to be speaking "standard" English. So it's not true that Singlish can be used as the only language for an entire interaction.
One more example: the government body in charge of regulating the media in Singapore forbids the use of Chinese dialects and Singlish on local television. The former has been easy to enforce, because Chinese dialects like Hokkien, Cantonese, and Teochew are fully developed languages and it is easy to recognise them. When the television operator buys shows from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or elsewhere which use these dialects, it simply dubs over them with Mandarin, an approved language. Sometimes the television news will interview people who use these dialects, and their responses will be similarly dubbed. But the latter rule has proven to be a slippery one to enforce. There's no such thing as a movie or show made entirely in Singlish. Rather, there are English shows and movies that contain Singlish utterances here and there. And even then, it's hard to pin down what exactly is a Singlish utterance that requires dubbing into "proper" English. If a character says "You love Suzy, meh?", is dubbing really called for given that "You love Suzy?" is the grammatical equivalent in English and the only thing that makes the first utterance Singlish is the inclusion of "meh"?
Assumption 2: Singlish = bad English
Singlish and "standard" English tend to be mentioned in the same breath, which only serves to highlight the contrast between them. English that is "correct" is "standard" English, and anything that is not "standard" English is automatically "wrong". Singlish is not "standard" English, so it is wrong.
Obviously, the government gleefully exploits this to attack Singlish. Equating Singlish with "improper" English, then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong in 1999 lamented that the popular television character Phua Chu Kang's use of Singlish was affecting schoolchildren's ability to learn "proper" English because it was fashionable to throw around Singlish catchphrases like "Don't pray pray" ("pray" is the Singaporean pronunciation of "play"; the phrase means something along the lines of "don't take this lightly") from the show rather than express themselves in "standard" English.
In defence, vocal Singlish supporter Colin Goh wrote that having children who don't speak "standard" English is a global occurrence and Singlish has nothing to do with it. He added that he had nothing against learning "standard" English because he agreed that "mastering the rules of grammar is both empowering and enjoyable". By saying these things, he is accepting that Singlish is not "good" English and has no rules of grammar that need to be mastered.
Linguistically speaking, it's difficult to parse out what are features of Singlish and what is simply "broken" English. But the very act of contrasting the two is a deliberate ploy. The anti-Singlish camp uses it as an offensive weapon, arguing that Singlish is a poison that destroys "good" English in Singapore so it must be wiped out before it does irreparable harm. The pro-Singlish camp uses it more like a badge of honour, as it unites Singaporeans from all walks of life. Educated Singaporeans are proud to deliberately use Singlish as it signals that they stand together with their less-educated counterparts. Both sides find it useful to return to this assumption again and again, which is why it persists.
Assumption 3: The Singlish issue is significant to the nation as a whole
The Singapore government is somewhat (in)famous for its "crisis mentality", in which it inflates the issues it deems important so much that it reaches a fever pitch in the national agenda. They don't do this because they are panicky people. They do it on purpose to frighten the population into doing what the government tells them to do. One of the ministers once said: "And one of the things we can do to get a little further down the road a little faster is to raise the specter of total disaster as the alternative... Within this context, sooner or later they [the citizens] will change."
Singlish is a victim of this tactic. As explained before, the government has portrayed Singlish as a threat to Singaporeans' ability to speak "standard" English. The government goes on to paint a startling picture: if Singaporeans can't speak "standard" English, they won't be understood by the rest of the world. The rest of the world won't do business with Singapore, and Singapore will become a poor country. In this way, the Singlish issue gets elevated to the level of national importance, as it concerns the economic well-being of the country.
Singlish supporters also see Singlish as a matter of national importance, but in a different sense. They portray Singlish as an important marker of the "Singaporean identity", warning that erasing it would damage Singapore's cultural heritage. Pointing out that Singlish grew from the mixing of port labourers from many countries in Singapore's early days, pro-Singlish commentators say that Singlish's unglamourous nature is to be embraced because it represents who Singaporeans truly are: people descended from these migrant workers whose lives really were difficult and dirty. This is something "standard" English can never do, because it has no link to the early migrants.
These three shared assumptions appear many times in claims made by both sides over the years. Let's now look at two claims in which we can see these assumptions being used.
Claim 1: Singlish has no value
One of the goals of the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM), especially in the first few years of its existence, was to stamp out Singlish. This was because the government worried that Singlish would affect Singaporeans' ability to speak "standard" English per Assumption 2, which would in turn spell the economic downfall of the country per Assumption 3. As Goh Chok Tong put it, Singlish is something "the rest of the world will find quaint but incomprehensible".
But despite its best efforts, SGEM has not managed to get rid of Singlish. Realising that it had set for itself an impossible task, SGEM now adopts a softer stance on Singlish. In recent publications teaching people "good" English, it refrains from mentioning Singlish at all. This is in stark contrast to what it used to produce. A 2003 lesson by SGEM featuring a British expatriate named Jane includes the line: "First impressions are very important. In her first few hours in Singapore, Jane has heard mostly Singlish, and she’s clearly not impressed..."
As a whole, the government flips between being strongly anti-Singlish and reluctantly accepting of it depending on circumstances. The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) touts Singlish in its promotional materials for tourists, calling it Singapore's "own brand of English" as "fondly referred to" by Singaporeans. See how this violates the assumption that Singlish and English are two different things, per Assumption 1. STB goes on to say: "With our multi-racial background, it’s not surprising that ‘Singlish’ borrows from the many different languages spoken in Singapore." It is this very same multi-racial background that supporters of Singlish argue Singlish represents, per Assumption 3. It suits STB's agenda to be positive towards Singlish and use it as a selling point in attracting visitors, so Singlish does indeed have value, even in the ever-pragmatic economic sense of raking in tourism dollars. We will encounter this concept again in Chapter 5, which discusses how Singlish is like a commodity.
Singlish having no value is the government's justification for using SGEM to try to destroy Singlish, but this is a problematic claim that even the government itself through STB seems not fully committed to.
Claim 2: Singlish is not elitist
Singlish supporters like Singlish because its unglamourous nature supposedly represents Singapore's heritage as the descendants of humble port labourers, per Assumption 3. They portray Singlish as the everyman's language that all Singaporeans use, whether they are rich or poor, educated or not.
But this is not borne out by how Singlish is actually used, especially by the supporters themselves. Singlish is often used in a purposeful and playful manner by people with an excellent command of language, and its features are usually exaggerated for dramatic or comedic effect. Take for example this sentence: "It’s si beh condemn that as Chinese peepur, our standard of Chinese am not as powderful as our Engrand." (It's very bad that even though we are Chinese, our standard of Chinese is not as good as our standard of English.) This sentence is quite distorted even if we apply Singlish norms. The phrase "si beh" is used to intensify adjectives, such as "si beh siong" meaning "extremely stressful", but here it is used to intensify the verb "condemn". The words "powderful" and "Engrand" replace "powerful" and "English" respectively in what is meant to be caricatures of Singaporean pronunciation, but it's highly doubtful that real Singaporeans speak that way. The only instance of accurate representation of Singaporean speech is the spelling of "people" as "peepur", because documented research evidence does show that Singaporeans routinely drop the ending consonant sounds in words. Also notable is that per Assumption 1, not the entire sentence is "ungrammatical" English: pronunciation aside, the tract "that as Chinese peepur, our standard of Chinese" conforms to the rules of "standard" English.
A related observation is that many of the strongest advocates for Singlish are highly educated, often in the artistic, cultural, and literary fields. The aforementioned Colin Goh has a Master's degree in law. They are coming from the perspective of elites, so there is a problem when they try to make the claim that Singlish is not elitist because their views do not represent the views of the non-elite in society, such as those who, due to lack of educational opportunities, don't have a good enough grasp of language to use Singlish in the same playful way that the elites do.
We will see this idea again in Chapter 4, when we will take a closer look at who the parties are in the Singlish debate.
For now, let's end off with an amusing, if mildly disturbing, anecdote of how language experts, including linguists like Professor Wee, tend to be treated with dismissal and disdain when they try to give their inputs to public debates about language.
A linguist was on a panel of experts at a public forum. Someone asked her if the standard of English in Singapore was declining. She replied that it's not a simple question to answer, because tracking the standard of a particular language over time is tricky. The ways in which people use language are ever-changing, so what may have been unacceptable use of a particular language years ago may now be acceptable and vice versa, making it difficult to develop a fair test of language standards that can account for such generational variations.
This is a textbook response to a deceptively simple question. Unfortunately, the audience wasn't looking for textbook responses. They wanted an expert opinion that validated the conclusion that they had already arrived at on their own: that English standards in Singapore were indeed slipping. The linguist's answer didn't satisfy them and an elderly man stood up to let her know this in no uncertain terms.
"When I speak, even the university’s president has to listen to me!" he began, to impress upon her what an influencer he was and how much weight his view carried with the powers-that-be. Then he berated her for not reaching the same judgement as the audience.
Sadly, this reflects the role that language experts are confined to in public discussions about language. One side seeks input from a language expert, and the expert's views which align with that side's agenda are used to prop up that side's argument by lending it an air of credibility. At the same time, the expert's views which don't align with that side's agenda are discarded. Worse, if the expert disagrees entirely with that side, the expert risks being denigrated, possibly in humiliating fashion.
In the next chapter, we return to this topic of language experts.
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