SINGLISH: The Phenomenon of Linguistics in Singapore

Summary from: http://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/langnet/definitions/singlish.html

            Singapore is situated in South-east Asia. Since long time ago strategic place of Singapore has attracted western people to come. History noted down that British conquered Singapore that they took control in that country. Since then, the colonial government encouraged people to come to the Singapore. As the result, even to date, Chinese ethnics were the largest community in Singapore, followed by Indian and Malay.

            The development of English started from School of colonial Singapore. At that time very few children went to school at all, and even fewer were educated in English. 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. 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 ethnical languages in Singapore.

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 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.

In short, Singlish stands for Singaporean English. It is a kind of English varieties spoken by Singaporean. It has unique features since varies ethnics exist in Singapore. Those are Chinese at the most, Malay, and Indian. Those ethnics speak not only English, but also the languages that are spoken in their own community: Chinese people will speak Hokkien Chinese, for instance; Malay people speak Malay; etc. sThe differences above mentioned brings into community across the country.

For better understanding of the linguistics phenomenon presented above, let’s take a look at some examples. Kiasu, for instance, it is from Hokkien. The word refers to student who is always the first to get the book out of the library and always the first to get their assignments in to the teacher. This term firstly appeared in 1990s. Some words are also from Malay, for instance, habis which means finished.

The most significant changes that we can figure out in Singaporean English is that the particle and grammar feature in Singlish. Singaporean tend to add up article “lah” and “ah” in their speaking. “ah” refers to expecting agreement, while “lah” refers to the  expressing of assertion. For instance, And then how many rooms ah?; You see my husband's not at home lah. That's the problem, ah. Grammar features of Singlish seem committing grammar fallacy, for instance; what happen yesterday; she so pretty; she like us.

In addition, voiced and voiced less words are treated similarly, especially voiced and voiceless fricatives in final position. This also affects the (f) and (v) sounds and the (th) and (dh) sounds. Sometimes, especially in informal speech, people do not distinguish between voiced and voiceless plosives in final postion, so that sometimes in Singapore HOP is similarly pronounced as the way of HOB, BIT and BID,  BACK and BAG.