Phenomena
Much as being a nutritionist would make a person mindful of his or her eating habits, being a student of linguistics has made me more inquisitive about my use of language. As a child I didn’t consciously think about when to use which language and where, but as an adult I now find myself thinking back to the fact that I acquired Mandarin from watching Channel 8 drama series, in a family that spoke no Mandarin. These, and other details, have become important points of entry to understanding what I now consider to be my native tongue – Singlish.
You might say that a penchant for language runs in the family. My great-grandfather was a court translator in 19th-century Malaya, translating between English and Malay, Hokkien, Teochew or Cantonese. My parents are the prototypical multilinguals of their generation, conversationally fluent in English and other random Chinese dialects including Hakka, while also managing a smattering of Malay and Tamil. Me? Although I’ve lived in Chinatown all my life, I have often been told I’m a disappointment because I don’t speak any Chinese dialects, nor is my Mandarin considered to be of a decent standard. As for my Singlish: okay lah, still can get by. A familiar scenario, I suppose, for those from my generation.
It’s easy, of course, to pin down Singlish to its prominent features – the particles lah, leh, lor, meh, or our mish-mash use of Malay and Hokkien vocabulary with English-esque grammar. What is not easy, as any sociolinguist will tell you, is locating a homogenous and monolithic Singlish across all speakers, although various scholars have tried to do so. John Platt and Heidi Weber first identified Singlish as a ‘creoloid’ in the 1980s, a controversial concept that understands Singlish as having creole-like typological properties despite lacking a known pidgin ancestor. More recently, linguists have begun to think of Singlish as a new variety of postcolonial English. In the last decade, Singaporean linguists such as Lionel Wee and Lisa Lim have argued that it developed from a 19th-century Malay trade creole called Bazaar Malay and was significantly influenced by the Peranakan community, which was more familiar with English due to their Westernised education and loyalty to the British crown.
But what if the construct of ‘Singlish’ is more contemporary than it seems? The concept of Singlish as a single, identifiable entity may well be a cultural conception born from just the last few decades, when Singapore gained political autonomy from the British crown and Malaysia, and needed to define itself with a multicultural yet English-centred language policy. What intrigues me is the idea that ‘Singlish’ only started gaining credence in the public mind just before 2000, when the Singapore government embarked on a little version of linguistic genocide with the introduction of the Speak Good English Movement. The campaign singled out Singlish as the enemy, vilifying it as broken and ungrammatical English. Although English has been adopted as Singapore’s lingua franca since independence, the Speak Good English Movement of the last decade set out to foment linguistic insecurity by specifically targeting Singlish. Perhaps, by persecuting it as a non-standard, deviant form, Singapore officials heightened an awareness of “Singlish” on a national – and more visceral – level.
Words in motion
If its history is a muddled mess, then we should not expect the present state of Singlish to be easy to quantify, delineate and define. Think of Singlish as an organism that adapts to its environment. Previously popular terms like “wah piang”, “alamak” and phrases like “because the sky is so high, the bird shit in your eye” are fading from the Singlish lexicon, as is the dynamic nature of all languages. For one, I heard my brother use the latter phrase in the 1990s, when he was in his 20s. Now, in my 20s, I can’t remember the last time I heard someone say it, and for this article I had to look up its meaning on the Internet (it’s an annoyed, rhetorical retort to kaypohs who like to ask why this why that).
There’s also an interesting linguistic dimension to some of the phrases declining in popularity. Singapore blogger mr brown (aka Lee Kin Mun) has catalogued “steady bom pee pee”, “chop chop curry pok” and “yaya papaya” as bygone Singlish slang. These phrases use the repetition of the morphological stem (or the word itself) to create emphasis. Linguists call it reduplication, which is favoured in Malay but seldom found in Standard English.
Or consider the onomatopoeic “choot choot”, which mimics the kissing noises generated by a bilabial smacking of both lips. In Singlish, “choot” is generally synonymous with “kiss”, and as a verb, “chooting” is used to describe the act of making those disgusting kissy sounds used by lecherous ah peks to harass pretty young girls at your local kopitiam. When I was growing up in the 1990s, I often heard “choot”, but I barely hear it anymore these days. Where did it go? Might it have gone out of fashion as an outdated expression of crude misogyny?
What is clear is that Singlish vocabulary (and there’s no room here to even start on grammar) is changing in real time, and attempting to pin down one standard, homogenous form that everyone speaks seems quite futile. As a Singlish-spouting student of linguistics, another question I had to ask myself was when English transgresses into Singlish (such as when we add “lah” to a sentence) and when Singlish seemingly starts to resemble English (such as when we suffix English past-tense endings to a Singlish word, as in “kena-ed”). The sociolinguistic element is clear – we tend to speak variations of Standard English in more formal instances, and switch to our beloved vernacular in informal situations. But kneading out the linguistic details isn’t always easy.
The nature of languages is as such: the two codes that are Standard Singapore English and Singlish stand on opposite ends of a continuum, each really just an abstract, idealized conceptualization of a language. Unlike what teachers and grammarians might have you believe, there is no such thing as a perfect, ideal Standard English, nor is there a model Singlish. Me and you? We’re probably somewhere in between the quintessential.
A Singlish definition
With the ever-changing nature of Standard English and Singlish, this theoretical continuum will never be set in stone. But there will always be valiant efforts to codify and define language. Just as Standard English has its OED and Webster’s, Singlish has the the website Talking Cock’s Coxford Singlish Dictionary and the more formal A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English, by Jack Tsen-Ta Lee. On one hand, these platforms are primarily online (although a hardcopy Coxford is available), open to contributions and celebrate a new age of democratic knowledge. They allow innovations in language to surface and possibly even spread. After all, however marginal its use may be, surely no one will correct the entry of “cheebilised” – (a clipping of the expletive “chee bye” and “civilised” to mean “a sarcastic and crude way of saying ‘civilised’”) on Talking Cock.
Although these dictionaries are in no way definitive, standard dictionaries and provide valuable historical and cultural documentation,their role is never completely innocent. In the context of language use and learning, dictionaries are not only symbols of standardisation, but centres of power. For instance, both Singlish dictionaries adopt the conventions of a Standard English dictionary, subjecting Singlish sounds and meanings to the rules of documenting the Queen’s English. Just think about how “difficult” it is to spell Singlish words in English, and the orthographic variance for a word like “jude” (“joot”, “zut” and “chude”, just to name a few).
Moreover, Lee’s personal project A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English sets itself the task of tracking lexical etymology from literary, newspaper and quasi-formal contexts mostly since 2000. This emphasises the written over the spoken, the recent over the distant past – and for sure Singlish is predominantly a spoken language that is older than 12 years.
So there are implications of codifying a language such as Singlish for which there are variations on so many different levels – time, space, ethnicity, socioeconomic class and, on a linguistic level, pronunciation and spelling. Codification, and its related process standardisation, aim to weed out variation by privileging one variant over another, invariably influencing the way people speak. It is an important aspect of language policy and planning. Assuming that the state might one day recognise the cultural value of Singlish and start implementing the study of Singlish in schools, they will most probably teach a standardised form. Then, the issues of variation will no doubt surface in public discourse, as has been the case of Corsican French, a minority variety of French spoken in the Corsican island of France. A serious codification of Singlish would hardly do justice to our pluralistic linguistic ecology. If certain Singlishes become marginalised (for example, based on class or ethnicity) through standardisation, it would undermine the organic nature in which Singlish has evolved. In the current environment in which Singlish is still regarded by some as the mutant offspring of Standard English, the question of whose and which Singlish is being documented – not only in these dictionaries but in other writings, cultural projects, academic studies as well as language planning and policy – needs to be kept foremost.
Finally, it’s worth restating that languages are mutable but not in and of themselves. Mostly, they change because their speakers change. The language shifts in Singapore brought about by the bilingual language policy in school left a generation of Chinese speakers of Singlish, myself included, with no knowledge of the non-Chinese traditional substrate languages that feed Singlish its dynamicity, such as Malay and Tamil. The successes of the Speak Mandarin Campaign also left most Singaporeans with little knowledge of the other traditional substrate languages – Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese. Thus while we may understand and use Malay-Hokkien hybrid terms in Singlish like “buay tahan”, for us these words are ‘fossilised’ as Singlish and we’re not likely to introduce new hybrid terms with equal facility.
On the other hand, the new Singlish terms I’m hearing today often bring in other non-standard English words as well, even globalised ones. Just listen to how young people talk to each other. Online gaming and communities breathe and thrive on Singlish, infusing the lexicon with words from Internet chatter, such as “trolling” and “imba”. (Don’t scoff – last year the OED admitted the words “LOL”, “OMG” and “FYI” to its esteemed line-up.) I’ve heard my little brother go “Wah, this cockster on WoW damn imba sia.” With the increasingly cosmopolitan make-up of Singapore, the introduction of new cultures and languages into the mix might too throw up some new language innovations.
That said, being able to speak what we Singaporeans intuitively identify as “Singlish” will surely stand as a test of one’s naturalisation and acculturation to the Singapore environment. What, you think learning to lah properly very easy meh?
I’ve realised that over time and space, Singlish is a huge part of my identity. In my younger, idealistic years, I have fallen out with good friends while defending its honour. These days, I am simply proud of it – or as my friends in Oxford will have me say, suffix lah to everything: “Hi lah! Bye lah! I love you lah! I will miss you lah!” To them, April will always speak funny. But I can live with that. 
Words Huishan Aprilene Goh
Illustrations Norman Teh
