Long live Singlish!

last SG · 2007-07-26T13:14:31+00:00

Fark lah, workplan this workplan that. It's not THAT difficult to code-switch, assuming sufficient intelligence on the part of the individual and a willingn...

Short Ninja SG

Surely every country has their own 'Singlish'.Its not only casual but is the best form of communication for the different races and bridging generation gaps.As for speaking English in a totaly different environment......your Engrand no need to be superb lah just make sure it is standardized and clearly understood.Singlish is contagious and will never go away.

Mat Toro SG

Originally posted by SingaporeTyrannosaur:
[b]

LOL, if you haven't noticed our government has given up on stamping out Singlish, but talking about code switching in parliment as well.

They never said anything about stamping singlish out in the first place. you need to understand the issue very clearly my fren.

The basis of being able to code-switch is to know good English, and that's what they have been talking about of late.

Can we have a code switch course then? Can you design one please.

The real reason why our English standards are dismal is not the use of Singlish, but because our English standards are (by western standards) indeed dismal and there has obviously been a failure in one way or another in our hodgepodge language policies. Singlish simply moved in to fill the gap that our English education failed to provide to the masses who fell behind in the program, and indeed, a symptom and not the cause of the disease.

Not true buddy. The fact that there are many people who can speak excellent English in singapore proved you wrong. You can have a good speaker and a bad speaker sitting in the same class in every school. Its a matter of habit and effort and that is what the govt is saying.

As I said Mat Toro, you can moan all you want but Singlish will be here to stay for the simple reason if you want practicality and implementation, Singlish is pratically impossible to wipe out. As long as the Singaporean non elite exists with a feel of his land and culture, there will be Singlish.

So as someone said, long live Singlish.

As long as we insist on sticking with singlish and be lazy in changing our langauge habits, we will never be able to speak good english as a whole.

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

LOL, you're missing out the point... if there's anything more obvious from the language policies of Singapore is that it has created a disparity of skill in the midst of its speakers.

This condition is not unique to Singapore, but you could say that Singapore has been less consistent in dealing with it. This is because Singapore often pushes a contradictary language policy when it comes to promoting it's languages, trying to push for good english (for functional purposes) as well as mother tounge (for social purposes), and then keeping a national language of malay. All this while ignoring the cultural and social aspect that arises from dialect that leads the some being quite confused in which language they can muster.

If you won't take it from me, at least take it from others who have observed the same thing.

How this situation came about is too complex a tale for here, not that I even know half of it, but I shall touch briefly on the role played by our politics.

Up until the 1960s, and even in schools where English was the medium of instruction, no one assumed that the children spoke English as a family language. Consequently, the methods used were those of teaching English as a second language, which meant very careful attention paid to enlarging vocabulary and instilling the rules of grammar. Much time was spent on grammar drills to hone the pupils' skills at things like the future perfect tense, the subjunctive and the fine shades of meaning among similar words. See example at right.

However, in the 1970s, a rapid conversion of all schools into English-medium ones took place, as the government shut down Chinese, Malay and Tamil-medium schools. As demand for English teachers grew, so standards fell. Furthermore, geography, physics or carpentry teachers were also required to use English in their classes, but as these adults were not using English as their first language, it meant that the students would hear broken English from those teachers.

In addition, the rapid expansion of English-medium education meant that students from families that never used English at home had to use English in school. This was unlike the previous decades when the English-medium schools tended to attract pupils from homes that did speak some English. Just when the task of teaching English became wider and harder, the difficulty of getting teachers who spoke good English became greater.

At around the same time, the Education ministry experimented with American teaching methods. Those were the days when British prestige had sunk to new lows and even the Sterling Pound had to be bailed out by the IMF. America was the shining example of modernity. These teaching methods involved more listening and speaking than being drilled in grammar rules.

It was a hopelessly misguided change, for the linguistic background in Singapore was nothing like White middle-class America, where children absorbed English with mother's milk. Learning by immersion and example cannot work if the environment was saturated with bad English.

(Nowadays, the scales have fallen from our eyes. Every time we see some American write on any bulletin board something like, "What I want to know is whether your expected to tip...." we see living proof that teaching language without grammar drills simply doesn't work.)

Another American idiocy imported into our education system was the multiple-choice test. I myself don't remember any use of multiple-choice testing when it came to English in my schooldays. We had to write long essays. We had to read and re-read dense passages followed by some questions to test our understanding of the text, and those questions had to be answered with a paragraph or two. We had to paraphrase other sentences or condense an entire paragraph into a key sentence to capture the gist of it. We had to pen telegrams in exactly 25 words (which I thought was a useless skill since telegrams were obsolescent, only to discover decades later that I can tap out more concentrated sms messages than most). And we had to transpose sentences into other time frames to test our mastery of tenses, or insert new ideas into an existing sentence by means of additional clauses.

How multiple choice questions would teach students to do all that with language, I cannot imagine.

Thus, except for a small minority, the masses picked up, not English, but a corrupted form of it.

More politics was to come. The annual Speak Mandarin Campaign confused priorities. Together with political campaigns against western "yellow culture", official veneration of Confucianism and emphasis on our "roots", "aping the West" became a liability. It was a small step from here to a general ridicule of people with perfect English and internationally acceptable intonation.

Meanwhile, the economics-trained technocrats in our government said that Singapore must preserve our competitive advantages vis-à-vis a rising China, and one of them is the fact that we're an English-speaking country.

Lo! we're now officially an English-speaking country, because the government said so. Therefore, what we speak must be English. If it sounds like English and the government says it's English, it's English. Since we have arrived, why is there a need to make an effort to improve our English?

It's hardly surprising then that Richard Teo, in his letter to the Straits Times (15 January 2005), said, "there did not seem to be any effort to speak in complete sentences or even speak coherently without the interjection of other dialectal or language words."

As he concluded, there "is a seeming disregard of the use of proper spoken English."

Good he left it at spoken English. He'd get a heart attack if he saw the written English we have here!

bigmouthjoe SG

Hey for once I agree with you. Long live Singlish!

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

LOL, do you need a course to learn how to walk? Code switching comes naturally to all good English speakers. Simply put, to teach code switching means one has to teach our people to speak good English. Code switching comes naturally once the user understands the difference in structure in both languages.

The problem is, do you seriously think our educational system offers a route out for non-native english speakers who are not raised up in an english-speaking household? Or are all Ah Bengs and Ah Sengs who can't speak good English simply lazy?

Our language habits will not change for the simple reason language habits ARE a social construct, and you can't change the language without having to change the social structure of things.

Asking Ah Beng and Ah Seng to start using proper English simply won't work for the simple reason having a good grounding in any language comes from a lifetime and upbringing grounded in the language. Hence the MOE's first few language policies were correct in teaching English as if it was for non-native speakers, but ran into error when they decided to flip over totally to the system we have today that teaches English as if ALL households were raised with an English background, language stratification is inevitible.

From language stratification, creoles will simply emerge. Singlish is not broken english as it is a almost whole new language in itself, with its own unique structure and sense.

And seriously it's not as if I have not encountered people who are making an active effort to learn better English, but unfortunately our educational system isn't helping by tieing their hands behind their back by assuming they are raised as English speakers.

And most importantly, the most productive way of teaching Singlish speakers on how to use original English is not in telling them to stop using Singlish, but how to TRANSPOSE from Singlish to English. Unfortunately since Singlish is not a formalized language, such a thing can only be done in the informal manner from friends or family.

If you want a course I seriously doubt that is possible. But for some reason you seem to think that formalized courses are the solution to each and every thing, especiall social and cultural things like language... last I checked the government hasn't launched courses to raise our birth rate.

Singlish is a key ingredient in the unique melting pot that is Singapore. This is a city where skyscraping banks tower over junk boats; a city where vendors hawk steaming pig intestines next to bistros that serve haute cuisine. The SGEM's brand of good English is as bland as boiled potatoes. If the government has its way, Singapore will become a dish devoid of flavor. And I'm not talking cock.

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

Singapore English has its origins in the schools of colonial Singapore. In the nineteenth century very few children went to school at all, and even fewer were educated in English. The local lingua franca was a pidginised variety of Malay, called Pasar Melayu, or Bazaar Malay. This can still be heard in the region, especially from older people. The people who spoke English and sent their children to English medium schools were mainly the Europeans, the Eurasians (people of mixed racial ancestry), some of the small minorities, such as the Jews, some of the Indians and Ceylonese, and also a group of Chinese people usually called the Straits Chinese, who had ancestors of long residence in the region, and who spoke a variety of Malay usually called Baba Malay which was influenced by Hokkien Chinese and by Bazaar Malay. The fact that all these children would have known Malay probably explains why most of the loan words in Singapore Colloquial English are from Malay. The largest group of teachers were Eurasians, and there were also many teachers from Ceylon and India. European teachers were never more than a quarter of the total teaching staff in a school, and they usually taught the senior classes. These Europeans may have been from Britain (which at that time included Ireland) but were also from the USA, Belgium and France. The children in these schools would have been exposed to many varieties of English.

In the first twenty years of the twentieth century, English medium education became popular for all groups. Girls started going to school in larger numbers too. By the 1950s nearly all children went to school, and the majority were educated in English. By the 1980s. all education was in the medium of English (with children learning another language alongside English). Singapore English probably grew out of the English of the playground of these children of various linguistic backgrounds who were learning English at school. As more and more of its people experienced learning English at school, English became widely spoken, alongside Singapore's many other languages. Since Singapore became an independent Republic in 1965, the use of English has increased still further. For many Singaporeans, English is the main language. Many families speak English at home and it is one of the the first languages learnt by about half of the current pre-school children. Well over half of the population born since 1965 are native speakers of English, and the proportion of native speakers of English is still rising.

Nearly everyone in Singapore speaks more than one language, with many people speaking three or four. Most children grow up bilingual from infancy and learn more languages as they grow up. Naturally the presence of other languages (especially various varieties of Malay and of Chinese) has influenced the English of Singapore. The influence is especially apparent in the kind of English that is used informally, which is popularly called Singlish, but which is called Singapore Colloquial English or Colloquial Singapore English in most academic writing.

Singlish is a badge of identity for many Singaporeans, and, as you can see from the satirical website, Talkingcock, there are some websites that are written in it. Many Singaporeans move smoothly between Singapore Colloquial English and Standard English. As most Singaporeans use a lot of Singapore Colloquial English to their children, children tend to speak Singapore Colloquial English before they speak Standard English. It is still the case in Singapore that the younger you are and the richer your family is, the more likely you are to have English (and that usually means Singapore Colloquial English) as your native language. But Standard English is used in formal contexts, as it is all over the English-using world. Take a look at Singapore's leading English newspaper, The Straits Times.

Since the 1960s linguists and sociologists have studied the features and the functions of English in Singapore from a number of perspectives. Those who would like to know about studies of Singapore English should look at my annotated list of the major works on Singapore English. You might also like to look at the articles which I wrote on Singapore English for Speech Therapists. David Deterding maintains a full scholarly bibliography of academic work on Singapore English.

There is also plenty of creative work in English by Singaporeans and you can find lots of information about Singapore literature at the Contemporary and Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English site maintained by George Landow.

You can read more about the history of Singapore English in:

Gupta, Anthea Fraser. 1994. The Step-tongue: Children's English in Singapore. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Mat Toro SG

Oh I see, you are finally getiing the point aren't you?

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

Mechanics
Code-switching is distinct from pidgin, in which features of two languages are combined. However, creole languages (which are very closely related to pidgins), when in close contact with related standard languages (such as with Jamaican Creole English or Guyanese Creole English), can exist in a continuum within which speakers may code-switch along a basilect-mesolect-acrolect hierarchy depending on context. Code-switching is also different from (but is often accompanied by) spontaneous borrowing of words from another language, sometimes outfitted with the inflections of the host language, sometimes not.

Code-switching within a sentence tends to occur more often at points where the syntax of the two languages align; thus it is uncommon to switch from English to French after an adjective and before a noun, because a French noun normally "expects" its adjectives to follow it. It is, however, often the case that even unrelated languages can be "aligned" at the boundary of a relative clause or other sentence sub-structure.

Intersentential switching, switching outside the sentence or clause level, for example at sentence or clause boundaries
Intra-sentential switching, switching within a sentence or clause
Tag-switching, switching a tag phrase or word from language B into language A (this is a common intra-sentential switch)
Intra-word switching, switching within a word itself, such as at morpheme boundary

Example
Kroskrity (2000:340-341) gives the following example of code-switching by three older male Arizona Tewa speakers, who are trilingual in Tewa, Hopi, and English. The topic concerns the selection of a site for a new high school on the eastern Hopi Reservation:

Speaker A: Tututqaykit qanaanawakna. [spoken in Hopi]
Speaker B: Wédítókánkegenaadi imbí akhonidi. [spoken in Tewa]
Speaker C: Naembí eeyae nąeląemo díbítóámmí kąayįį wédimu::di. [spoken in Tewa]
English translation:

Speaker A: "Schools were not wanted." [spoken in Hopi]
Speaker B: "They didn't want a school on their land." [spoken in Tewa]
Speaker C: "It's better if our children go to school right here rather than far away." [spoken in Tewa]
In this two-hour conversation, these men had been speaking primarily in Tewa. However, when Speaker A makes a statement that considers the Hopi Reservation as a whole, he switches to Hopi. This usage of the Hopi language when speaking of Hopi-related issues is a conversational norm in the Arizona Tewa speech community. Kroskrity makes the claim that these Arizona Tewa who identify both as Hopi and Tewa use the different languages to help construct and maintain these discrete ethnic identities linguistically.

See also

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

Code-switching
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Code-switching is a term in linguistics referring to alternation between two or more languages, dialects, or language registers in a single conversation, stretch of discourse, or utterance between people who have more than one language in common.

Early work on bilingualism claimed that codeswitching was not governed by systematic rules. Linguists now agree that this early claim was incorrect[citation needed].

There are two principal directions in which code-switching research has developed. One focuses on the social motivations for switching, a line of inquiry concentrating both on immediate discourse factors such as lexical need and the topic and setting of the discussion, and on more distant factors such as speaker or group identity, and relationship-building.

The other direction of research concerns syntactic constraints on switching. This is a line of inquiry that has postulated grammatical rules and specific syntactic boundaries for where and why a switch may occur.

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

Notable examples
Aku/Dialect des Krio
Afro-Seminole Creole
Antiguan Creole: spoken in Antigua and Barbuda
Antillian Creole English
Australian Kriol: Also known as Roper River Creole, has become the major non-English language among Aboriginal Australians with over 10,000 first language speakers.
Bahamian Dialect: an English-based creole, widely spoken in the Bahamas
Belizean Kriol is spoken in Belize.Closely related to Miskito Coastal Creole, Jamaican Creole, Rio Abajo Creole, Colón Creole, and San Andrés and Providencia Creole.
Bislama: Bislama (older Bêche-la-mar) is an English-based creole, and is the national language of Vanuatu.
Cameroonian Pidgin English, Kamtok, or Cameroonian Creole: is a linguistic entity of Cameroon. It is also known as Kamtok. Two varieties are Limbe-Krio and Grafi. Cameroonian Pidgin English is an English-based creole language. About 5% of Cameroonians are native speakers of the language.
Englog (popularly known as Konyo English): is a creole spoken in the Philippines. It is English infused with Tagalog, and to some extent, Spanish words and phrases. Unlike its parent tongue, Taglish, it has its own structure and lexicon and because of this it is often considered as a bastardized version of English by some purists. The creole was originally spoken by Filipino mestizo teenagers who intend to Filipinize themselves. However, due to massive media attention, it gradually became part of the mainstream culture.
Gullah: Gullah is an English-based creole spoken in the Sea Islands and the adjacent coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida.
Guyanese Creole: Spoken throughout Guyana and similar to Jamaican Creole (see below), but with a different accent and some word substitutions; probably due to the greater Indian (Indo-Guyanese not Amerindian) influence. The language varies across the regions within the country.
Hawaiian Creole English: Hawaiian Pidgin began as a pidgin used in the early European colonization of the Hawaiian Islands. English served as the superstrate language, with Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, and Hawaiian elements incorporated. Children started using it as a lingua franca, and by the 1920s it had creolized and become a minor language of Hawaii, as it still is today.
Kru English
Jamaican Creole: Not to be confused with Jamaican English, which is a dialect of English. Jamaican Creole is an English-based creole language spoken in Jamaica. It represents a history of contact among many different types of speakers drawn from many ethnic, linguistic, and social background. Naturally understandable to speakers of creoles in Guyana, Nicaragua, Panama and Costa Rica. Reported to be extremely close to Belize Creole, the English Creole of the Bahamas, close to Guyana, Grenada, Virgin Islands and Saint Vincent creoles, as well as being very close to Sierra Leone Krio. Jamaica Creole is the dominant language in Jamaica and gaining in prestige.
Krio: Spoken in Sierra Leone.
Kreyol: is spoken in Liberia, and has English and French as superstrate languages, with several West African languages as substrate.
Manglish: spoken in Malaysia, mixture of mainly Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Tamil (a south Indian Dravidian language), and British English.
Mekatelyu: spoken in coastal Costa Rica after introduction from Jamaica.
Mískito Creole English: Mískito Coastal Creole is a language spoken in Nicaragua based on English. It is nearly identical Belizean Creole (Kriol), and similar to all Central American Creoles. The number of speakers of Mískito Coastal Creole is below 200,000[1]. Mískito Coastal Creole does not have the status of an official language. Spoken in the coastal areas.
Nigerian Pidgin English: While rudimentally spoken all over Nigeria, English is the accepted language of transaction and communication. The Nigerian Pidgin English dates back to the colonial era, where locals were hired to work with the British colonials and ended up developing it to the Creole language it is today. See also Nigerian Pidgin.
Pijin: Spoken in the Solomon Islands.
Pitkern, Norfuk: Spoken exclusively by the inhabitants of the Pitcairn Islands and Pitcairnese migrants in Norfolk Island, an 18th century dialect of English is spoken with the Tahitian language to form the Creole language known as Pitkern, or Norfuk in Norfolk Island.
Saramaccaans, or Saamáka
Saint Kitts Creole: Spoken in Saint Kitts and Nevis.
Singlish: Singlish is a creole based on British English. It originated in Singapore, and spread to parts of Malaysia (known locally as Manglish). It is a mixture of mainly Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien (a Chinese dialect), Tamil (a south Indian Dravidian language), and British English.
Sranan Tongo: in Suriname.
Tok Pisin: is spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. English is the superstrate language, with various Papuan languages providing grammatical and lexical input.
Torres Strait Creole: Spoken by Torres Straits Islanders.
Trinidadian Creole English: Spoken in Trinidad.
Tobagonian Creole English: Spoken in Tobago.
Virgin Islands Creole: Spoken in the Virgin Islands.

Dr Who SG

hoi,--what the fish you 2 talking about ah?

Mat Toro SG

i think he just went nuts.
too much overnight chat rooming.

walesa SG

And then you have those who are logically incoherent and senselessly illogical despite proclaiming to speak with a brand of "superb grammar". Laughing

Mat Toro SG

thats right, you happen to be one of those incoherent ones.

thanks

walesa SG

You've got a deranged idiot trying to paddle some spin to folks with an IQ lower than his shoe size. Apparently, he's still trying hard with his brand of "superb grammar". Laughing

Short Ninja SG

people got time to write a thesis on Singlish in here some more.That is your proof that Singlish is Number 1 !! case closed Mr. Green

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

As usual, Mat Toro has something to say on many things, but he damnant quod non intelligunt

Mat Toro SG

adadadadada…..... wats up doc! me no understand watcha talkin.

Fingolfin_Noldor SG

I never quite thought to see the day when someone else actually exceeds the stupidity of OM and Gazelle, or even that noisy lion. I thought they were bad enough.

This guy obviously is making it his secret goal to be the next Great Village Idiot and to score an A+ in the course on Village Idiocy!

Mat Toro SG

yes, it was stupid alright. nobody understood what ST is writing. And he insists on directing his language in a way that is not understood by the person he wrote to. I find it very very funny. Ahahahahahahahaha…................

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