Singlish

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Singlish, a portmanteau of the words Singaporean and English, is the English-based creole spoken colloquially in Singapore. It shares substantial linguistic similarities with Malaysian English (Manglish) in Malaysia, although distinctions could be made particularly in vocabulary.

Contents
1 Overview

1.1 Politics

2 Phonology

2.1 Consonants
2.2 Vowels
2.3 Prosody

3 Vocabulary

3.1 English words with different meanings in Singlish

4 Grammar

4.1 Topic prominent
4.2 Nouns
4.3 To be
4.4 The past tense
4.5 Negation
4.6 Repetition of verbs
4.7 Particles
4.8 Miscellaneous

5 See also
6 External links

Overview

Singlish originated with the arrival of the British and the establishment of English language schools in Singapore. Soon, English filtered out of schools and onto the streets, to be learned by non-English-speakers in a pidgin-like form for communication purposes. After some time, this new form of English, now loaded with substantial influences from Indian English, Baba Malay, and the southern varieties of Chinese, began to be learned "natively" in its own right. Creolization occurred, and Singlish then became a fully-formed, stabilized, and independent English creole.

Singlish is a sociolect continuum. The continuum runs through the following varieties:

Acrolectal: This is the most "high-class" form of speech, used by the well-educated in formal situations. Acrolectal Singaporean English is basically identical to formal British English, except that a "toned-down" version of Singlish pronunciation is used. For example, speakers of acrolectal Singaporean English attempt to restore the phonemes /θ/ and /đ/ (as in thin and then).

Mesolectal: This is "middle-class" Singlish, and is used in formal and semi-formal situations. At this level, features not found in other forms of English begin to emerge.

Basilectal: This is "street" Singlish, and is used by everyone, educated or not, in informal settings. Here can be found all of the unique phonological, lexical, and grammatical features of Singlish, which will be the subject of the rest of this article.

Pidgin: This is the "pidgin" level of Singlish, which is probably a good representative of an earlier stage of Singlish, before creolization took place and solidified Singlish as a fully-formed creole. Like all pidgins, speakers at the pidgin level speak another language as a first language, and Singlish as a second language. However, since many people today learn Singlish natively, the number of speakers at the "pidgin" level of Singlish is dwindling. (By definition, a pidgin is not learned natively.)

When Singaporeans speak to each other, code switching of Singlish with other languages, such as Chinese dialects, Malay, or Indian languages such as Tamil occurs very frequently. A sentence can begin in Singlish, switch languages several times along the way, and end up as another language. However, this can only occur if all participants of the conversation can already speak both Singlish and the language(s) into which they are switching. This article will therefore talk only about "pure" Singlish—the kind that may go on in a conversation between a Chinese, a Malay, and an Indian. Such speech will still contain Asian words, but those will be considered loanwords fully incorporated into Singlish, because everyone can understand them, regardless of what other Asian languages they may speak.

Politics

Due to its origins, Singlish shares many similarities with pidgin varieties of English, and can easily give off the impression of "broken English" or "bad English" to a speaker of some other, less divergent variety of English. In addition, the profusion of Singlish features, especially loanwords from Asian languages, mood particles, and topic-prominent structure, can easily make Singlish downright incomprehensible to a Briton or American. As a result, the Singaporean government considers Singlish a handicap, and in the interest of promoting equality and better communication with the rest of the world has launched the Speak Good English Movement to eradicate it, at least from formal usage. However, in recent years, the use of Singlish on television or radio is proliferating as localised Singlish is more popular among the general public.

Most Singaporeans, on the other hand, think "bladi Gahmen si peh kaypoh one, why always so bedek kacang horh". This sentence can be approximately broken down into:

Phonology

Main article: phonemic differentiation.

Singlish pronunciation, while built on a base of British English, is also heavily influenced by Chinese and Malay.

The phonology of Singlish:

Consonants

  bilabial labiodental alveolar postalveolar palatal velar glottal
stops p b   t d     k g  
affricates       tʃ dʒ      
fricatives   f (v) s (z) ʃ (ʒ)     h
nasals m   n     ŋ  
laterals     l        
approximants w   r   j    

(See International Phonetic Alphabet for an in-depth guide to the symbols.)

In general:

Vowels

Monophthongs

  front central back
close i   u
close-mid e ə o
open-mid ɛ ɔ
open   ɑ

Diphthongs

ai au ɔi iə uə

The vowel system of Singlish can be directly derived by merging vowel phonemes in the British Received Pronunciation vowel system. The following describes a typical system. Some speakers may further merge /e/ and /ɛ/; other speakers make a distinction between /i/ and /ɪ/, /ɛ/ and /ɛə/, or /ɑ/ and /ʌ/.

At the acrolectal level, there is some effort to "un-merge" the merged vowel phonemes, and to introduce elements from American English, such as rhotic vowels (pronouncing the "r" in bird, port, etc.)

Singlish phoneme matches RP phoneme(s) as in
/i/ /i/ meet
/ɪ/ pit
/e/ /eɪ/ day
/ɛ/ /ɛ/ set
/ć/ map
/ɛə/ hair
/ɑ/ /ɑ/ car
pass
father
/ʌ/ bus
/ɔ/ /ɒ/ mock
/ɔ/ thought
court
/o/ /əʊ/ low
/u/ /u/ room
/ʊ/ put
/ə/ - see below /ɜ/ bird
/ə/ idea
better
/ai/ /ai/ my
/au/ /au/ mouth
/ɔi/ /ɔi/ boy
/iə/ /iə/ here
/uə/ /uə/ tour
/ai jə/ /aiə/ fire
/au wə/ /auə/ power

Two words with idiosyncratic pronunciations:
flour /flɑ/ (expected: /flɑ wə/ = flower)
their /djɑ/ (expected: /dɛ/ = there)
Flour/flower and their/there are therefore not homophones in Singlish.

In general, Singlish vowels are tenser and "purer"—there are no lax vowels (which RP has in pit, put, and so forth), and even the diphthongs are pronounced with less "glide" than the diphthongs in RP. Note that the vowels of day and low are pronounced as monophthongs—i.e. vowels with no glide.

In addition, where other varieties of English have an unstressed /ə/, reduced from another vowel, such as in accept, example, and so on, Singlish tends to restore the full vowel. This is because Singlish de-emphasizes the role of stress (see section on prosody below).

In loanwords from Hokkien that contain nasalized vowels, the nasalization is often kept - one prominent example being the mood particle hor, pronounced as /hɔ~/—somewhat (but not quite) like the vowel in French dent.

Prosody

One of the most prominent and noticeable features of Singlish is its unique intonation pattern, which is quite unlike British or American English. For example:

Vocabulary

Singlish formally takes after British English (in terms of spelling and abbreviations), although naming conventions are in a mix of American and British ones (with American ones on the rise). For instance, local media have "sports pages" (sport in British English) and "soccer coverage" (the use of the word "soccer" is not common in British media). Singlish also uses many words borrowed from Hokkien, the dialect of more than 50% of the Chinese population in Singapore, and from Malay. In many cases, English words take on the meaning of their Chinese counterparts, resulting in a shift in meaning. This is most obvious in such cases as "borrow"/"lend", which are functionally equivalent in Singlish and mapped to the same Mandarin word, "借" (jič), which can mean to lend or to borrow. ("Oi, siao-eh, borrow me your calculator, can?")

Examples:

English words with different meanings in Singlish

Other idioms include:

Grammar

The grammar of Singlish has been heavily influenced by other languages and dialects in the region, such as Chinese and Malay. As a result, Singlish has acquired some unique features, especially at the basilectal level. Note that all of the features described below disappear at the acrolectal level, as people in formal situations tend to adjust their speech towards accepted norms found in other varieties of English.

Topic prominent

Singlish is topic-prominent, like Chinese. This means that Singlish sentences are usually constructed by first putting down a topic (or a known reference of the conversation), followed by a comment (or new information). The semantic relationship between topic and comment is not important:

- Hot is often confused with warm.

The above constructions can be translated analogously into Chinese or Japanese, which are topic-prominent languages.

Nouns

Nouns are optionally marked for plurality. In general, a noun that is used to refer to a general category is not marked for the plural, and does not take any articles:

It is more common to mark the plural in the presence of a modifier that implies plurality, such as "several", "both".

To be

The copula, which is the verb "to be" in most varieties of English, is treated somewhat differently in Singlish:

When occurring with an adjective, "to be" tends to drop out, and is often replaced by an adverb, such as "very". This is strongly reminiscent of Chinese and Malay (there is no to be verb in Malay) usage:

When occurring with "-ing" to form the continuous aspect, "to be" may similarly drop out, leaving the "-ing" form as the independent continuous form:

Slightly less common is the dropping out of "to be" when used as an equative between two nouns, or as a locative:

In general, "to be" drops out more behind nouns and pronouns (except "I", "he", and "she"), and much less behind a clause (what I think is...) or a demonstrative (this is...).

The past tense

Past tense marking is optional in Singlish. Marking of the past tense occurs most consistently in strong verbs (or irregular verbs), as well as verbs ending on -t and -d, such as:

Due to consonant cluster simplification, the past tense is unmarked when it is part of a complex consonant cluster:

The past tense tends to be unmarked if the verb in question goes on for an extended period, rather than as an isolated event (compare French imperfect):

A completed state can be expressed adding already or liao to the end of the sentence. (See particles section below.) This is similar to the English past tense, but does not cover past habitual or continuous occurrences.

Negation

Negation works in general like English, with not added after "to be", "to have", or modals, and don't before all other verbs. Contractions (can't, shouldn't) are used alongside their uncontracted forms.

However, due to final cluster simplification, the -t drops out from negative forms. This effectively makes -n the negative marker on modals:

An especially unique effect of this is that in the verb "can", its positive and negative forms are distinguished only by vowel (complex consonant clusters are not found in Chinese):

Also, never is used as a negative past tense marker, and does not have to carry the English meaning. In this construction, the negated verb is never put into the past-tense form:

Repetition of verbs

Another feature strongly reminiscent of Chinese, verbs are often repeated (e.g., TV personality Phua Chu Kang's "don't pray-pray!" pray = play.) In general verbs are repeated to imply vividness, repetition, and a sense of "wandering around":

Particles

Particles in Singlish are highly comparable to Chinese. They are generally used to express grammatical mood. For example:

Already or Oreddy
/ɔ11 rɛ33 di42/
Used to express a change in state, and is analogous to Chinese 了 (le):

Liao
/liɑu11/
Is similar to already.

Izzit or Is it
/i11 sit24/ or /i11 zit24/
Used to form yes-no questions, generic like the French n'est-ce pas?, regardless of the actual verb in the sentence. Izzit implies that the speaker has inferred (from some other evidence) that the answer is Yes, but needs it confirmed:

Meh
/mɛ55/
Also used to form yes-no questions, but with a decidedly different tone: the speaker implies that he/she had expected the answer to the question to be No, but has been surprised by new evidence that points the other way:

Or not
/ɔ11 nɔt41/
In a construction similar (but not identical) to Chinese, or not is used to form a yes/no question. Unlike is it or meh, or not carries no connotations of either Yes or No. Or not cannot be used with sentences already in the negative:

Arh or Ar or Ah
/ɑ24/
Inserted between topic and comment (often to give a negative tone), or at the end of a question (for added brusqueness).

One
/wɑn42/ or /wɑn55/
The word one is used to emphasize the predicate of the sentence by implying that it is in a continuous, habitual state. It can be compared to a similar use of de in southern Chinese. One used in this way does not correspond to any use of the word "one" in British or American English:

Lidat or Liddat or Like that
/lai11 dɛt41/
Is used to emphasize descriptions by adding vividness and continuousness:

Like that can also be used as in British or American English:

Lah
/lɑ55/ or /lɑ51/
The ubiquitous word 'lah' is used at the end of a sentence, for emphasis. In Malay it is used to change a verb into a command or to soften its tone, particularly when usage of the verb may seem impolite. To drink is minum, but 'Here, drink!' is minumlah. Hence a Singaporean would say

Lah is often used with brusque, short, negative responses:

Lah is also used for reassurance:

Lah can also be used to emphasize items in a spoken list, appearing after each item in the list.

Lah is not to be confused with 'la' (short for 'lad'), which is found in the Scouse dialect spoken in Liverpool, England

What or Wat
/wɑt11/
Used to remind or contradict the listener, often in order to explain some other point the speaker has:

Mah
/mɑ55/
Used to assert that something is obvious and final, and is usually used only with statements that are already patently true. This may seem condescending to the listener:

Lorh or Lor
/lɔ55/
A casual, sometimes joking way to assert upon the listener either direct observations or obvious inferences. This may also seem condescending if over-used:

Leh
/lɛ55/
Used to assert a command, request, claim or complaint:

Horh or Hor
/hɔ~24/
Used to draw the listener's attention and/or consent:

Miscellaneous

"Got" is used to mean either "there is" / "there are", or "has" / "have":

"Can" is used extensively as both a question particle and an answer particle. The negative is cannot.

In British/American English, "also" is used before the predicate, while "too" is used after the predicative at the end of the sentence. In Singlish, "also" (pronounced oso, see phonology section above) can be used in either position.

The order of the verb and the subject in an indirect question is the same as a direct question.

See also

External links

See also: Singlish, 1959, Abbreviation, Acrolect, Adverb, Affricate, African American Vernacular English, Alveolar