It’s been a while since we last looked at English in this blog series but, as a truly global language, we can’t keep ignoring it forever. This week we’re looking at a variety of English that developed over 6,500 miles away from England in our Five Fun Facts about Singlish!
1) Also known as ‘Colloquial Singaporean English’, Singlish is an English-based Creole language spoken in Singapore. With a vocabulary consisting of words from English, Malay, Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and Tamil, with a bit of American and Australian slang thrown in too, Singlish evolved among the working classes of Singapore, who learned English without formal schooling.
2) Singlish has a low prestige in Singapore, with many educated Singaporeans preferring to use Standard Singapore English. The similarities with pidgin varieties of English and the loanwords from Asian languages can make Singlish incomprehensible to a speaker of Standard English. The 2000 Speak Good English Movement aimed to eradicate Singlish from formal usage. Despite this, use of Singlish on television and radio has proliferated as Singlish continues to be popular among Singaporeans.
3) Singaporean writer Sylvia Toh Paik Choo was the first to put a spelling and a punctuation to Singlish in her books Eh Goondu (1982) and Lagi Goondu (1986), which are essentially a glossary of Singlish, which she terms 'Pasar Patois'.
4) Singlish sentences often begin with a topic and are followed by a comment, in a similar way to Chinese and Japanese. Unlike most other varieties of English, the semantic relationship between topic and comment is not important. For example:
Dis country weather very hot one. – In this country, the weather is very warm.
Dat joker there cannot trust. – That person over there is not trustworthy.
Tomorrow dun need bring camera. – You don't need to bring a camera tomorrow.
He play football also very good one leh. – He's very good at playing football too.
Walau, I want eat chicken rice – I am craving chicken rice.
I go bus-stop wait for you – I will be at the bus stop waiting for you.
5) ‘Lah’ (or ‘La’) is used at the end of many Singlish sentences. It is often used to soften the force of an utterance and encourage solidarity, although it can also be used in the opposite way to signal power. Other common Singlish phrases include:
Don’t pray pray ah!: “Don’t mess around!”
Oh, izzit?: “That’s interesting.” / “Oh, is that true?”
Dohwan: “No, thanks.” / “I don’t want it.”
Kiasu: A general term used to describe the highly competitive nature of many Singaporeans. It is originally a Chinese dialect expression that literally means “fear of losing”.
So how?: “So what do we do now?”
Alamak!: A general expression of dismay or incredulity.
Can can!: “Yes, definitely.”
Auntie / Uncle: A respectful form of an address for an older man / woman, respectively.
Lai dat also can?: “Is that acceptable?”
Come back next Thursday when we’ll be presenting five fun facts about the languages of Papua New Guinea!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
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