Talk:Singlish/2005-2006 archive

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Contents

Merging Manglish and Singlish

Yes, I know this sounds a bit controversial. But I think it's a good idea, considering how similar the two really are.

You can see my original suggestion here: Talk:British and Malaysian English differences#Merge. All comments are welcome! -- ran (talk) 04:56, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

While similarities are abound, there are also significant differences. The current Singlish article is far from being comprehensive. For example, there is alot of influence on Singlish from the National service experience among Singaporean males, which does not normally apply to Manglish. (Refer to the book Army Daze to see a glossary of NS-related singlish). On the other side, singlish lacks the context related to Malaysian politics. I'm not very familiar with Manglish, so maybe Malaysians studying in Singapore's universities would like to comment about these.  ;-) -- Vsion 20:53, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Singlish as diglossia

There are a few language models that are used to explain the Singlish phenomenon. In this article, the sociolect model was used and Singlish is described as a basilect and used by people of a lower social class. However, a diglossia model could also be used. This model explains the social functions of Singlish ie Singlish for informal occasions (the L variety) and Singapore StdE as formal version. This should be included too as it gives another insight into the Singlish phenomenon and apparently is the preferred model for studying the social functions of Singlish nowadays. (Would love to split the page but I don't know how yet...:(--zoek 18:51, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

A section on Usage?

I have this feeling that something is missing in the article, it seems too technical. Should we add a section on "Usage" or something to describe when people choose to use Singlish and when not to. In most situations, using Singlish is not advisable (eg. during job interview) but other times it is actually preferred (eg. during NS)? In some situations, using Singlish is a deliberate choice to achieve social goals. ex-PM Goh himself interjected some Singlish during his election campaign rallies to better connect with the voters, notwithstanding his 1999 rally speech on proper English. Even some foreign residents like to learn a few Singlish to engage in more delightful conversation with the locals. Do you guys think it is worth adding these information? --Vsion 21:25, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Absolutely. -- ran (talk) 05:37, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
Since you are so inviting, I went ahead orredy lah. Please help to clean up my mess, can? --Vsion 10:15, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

COE and co. -- Singlish vocabulary?

COE, PAP, NS, MRT and so on are simply widely known acronyms. Do they deserve a place among the "vocabulary"? 202.156.6.54 09:25, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Not only that, they're abbreviations of grammatically correct English names. I'm removing them.
202.156.6.54 11:41, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
Hey, i created this page List of Singapore abbreviations, a better place for them? :D --Vsion (talk) 13:28, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
Good job. I've added some acronyms myself. Descender 23:11, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

From TFA: "Singlish is generally intelligible to a speaker of another dialect of English," are you sure?

I'm a native speaker of standard British English (RP with a bit of Cockney). When I was in Singapore, I could understand everything spoken directly to me. However if two locals spoke to each other (and myself not directly involved in the conversation) then I could not understand a word, it was not until my fourth week that I realised that they were not speaking Chinese but Singlish!

Hmm... I suppose I was suffering from Singlishocentrism when I wrote that. I'm going to correct it. -- ran (talk) 21:28, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
I think Singlish would be generally intelligible to a bilingual person who spoke both (American/British) English and Chinese.
I find that Singlish is intelligible to me. Born and raised in America, but I speak enough Chinese to get by. Avriette 15:46, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
I'd doubt that. The inflection and pronunciation (of English words) of Singlish alone would render many words hard to make out. Knowledge of Mandarin wouldn't help an American/British speaker much. -- creamyhorror June 2006
I'm a native speaker of American English and I have no trouble understanding Singlish when I visit Singapore. It seems basically just normal English with a few Hokkien or Malay words thrown in here and there. I interrupt occasionally to ask "what's that mean?" and in no time I understood it, even when listening to Singaporeans talk to each other. 209.225.224.155 21:32, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
That's because Singaporeans consciously speak "good English" when talking to foreigners and in front of foreigners. Jpatokal 06:39, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
When you get two Singaporeans of the same race together, you'll almost certainly find them tossing in lots of their own language into the conversation, so what you're hearing isn't really Singlish but a mix of it and something else. The Singlish itself is mostly just really bad English, but it certainly isn't unintelligible. 203.116.91.80 04:29, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Miscategorization? Singlish or Singapore English?

I'm not sure if I can accept the following as Singlish:

a. send - to take somebody to somewhere - "I'll send you to the airport." b. stay - to live (in a place) - from Malay "tinggal". "She stay in Ang Mo Kio."

Both examples sound perfectly fine (non Singlish) to me, although the example given in (b) needs a minor correction i.e. "She stays in AMK". I don't know if the expressions are only used in Singapore. Even if they are, it seems more appropriate to label them as 'Singapore English'.

I believe that by "sound perfectly fine", you meant they are grammatically correct. With what I gather from this article, Singlish has a broad spectrum and it includes grammatically correct Singapore English as well but with some unique features or usage practices such as the examples you gave. For these examples, the translation to non-Singlish would be
I'll give you a ride to the airport.
She lives (or resides) in Ang Mo Kio. (Stay usually indicates temporariness: She stays in her friend's apartment over the weekend. )
The language that SM Goh discouraged was the extreme type of Singlish at one end of the spectrum, but this article is not restricted to just that... for practical reasons also, otherwise we need two separate articles. Just my amateur opinion, I will let the experts comment further. ;) --Vsion (talk) 23:02, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Singlish as the most compact form of English vs English

I speak it because I can compress the amount of words in a sentence to such an extent that I can save a lot of my energy and is still understandable to the people it matters most.

Singlish (Above statement): Can say (what i want to say) faster mah.

Note the "mah". Using suffixes such as these allow a speaker to refrain from varying one's pitch and tone. This allows us to save time and energy so that we can focus our attention on other matters. Like for example, procreation, which our Government so readily promotes.

I can however, switch between the two variants of the language. For "backward(/forward)-compatibility" reasons.

--BlueStream 16:05, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

This is an often-expressed and ill-conceived impression. There are many ways in which you could translate your (almost) English sentence into Singlish, and English certainly has a translation of your Singlish sentence, for example: "It's faster". Singlish is not more concise than English, and neither is it more expressive than English. Fact is that this is how Singlish speakers perceive things, which is only normal, given that it is their native language. A native speaker will always see their language as more effective, and that is the reason why you speak it rather than English. JREL 16:49, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
As a native Singaporean I suppose my opinion would be coloured, but I really do think that Singlish is more concise than more standard/prestige forms of English, objectively speaking. A basic example is the removal of articles and prepositions (probably from Chinese and/or Malay grammar): "I go to the market everyday" becomes "I go market everyday". -- creamyhorror June 2006

Fair enough, there's no way you can beat a variety of English that deletes the copula. Standard English will always have a longer sentence in that case. On the other hand, and to follow your line of argument, consider: "Yeah lah" vs "Yes" -- all the final particles make it slower. Also, I seem to notice that in higher mesolectal varieties, Singaporeans tend to repeat themselves more than English speakers would: repetition of the subject where English would have an elision, repetition of whole noun phrases, and of course the omnipresent and redundant "please kindly". I have no actual data on this, but I am very sceptical about any variety being more concise or efficient than another... JREL (talk) 01:28, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Today's article: Beng is cool, singlish a signal

Today, Today has an article, "Beng is cool, singlish a signal", the link is here. It has some interesting analysis that could be included in the Singlish article. --Vsion 08:42, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Request for explanations

Why the following description was considered as an inaccurate oversimplification?

"Basically and briefly, Singlish may be considered as: English vocabulary + mixed grammars + Chinese based prominent and intonation."

I don't think the stress and intonation is solely from Chinese. Most other chinese groups don't speak english in the same way, except in malaysia. For example, Hong kong's english sounds very different. Singlish's accent may be strongly influenced by Indian or tamil intonation; or a fusion of tamil-malay-chinese. In the early days (when policemen wore shorts), most local english teachers in Singapore were Indians, I think their influence on Singlish's intonation is most significant. In addition, the vocabulary is not strictly english, there are many borrowed words from other languauges. --Vsion 07:42, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Singlish's vocabulary is certainly not that of British and American English. There are many loanwords from Chinese and Malay. -- ran (talk) 18:09, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Katong accent

It is unfortunate that this entry has been removed.

One needs to be acutely aware that Singlish is spoken with varying accents - i.e. Malay, Chinese, Indian, Eurasian, Peranakan - depending on the speaker and his/her upbringing.

And not everyone goes along with the "lahs", "lehs", and "lors".

This is true. Speakers of different ethnicities (and indeed social groups) speak Singlish differently, and not merely with different accents, but different expressions and structures as well. I'm hard-pressed to find an example off the cuff though. I think that sub-dialects and slang of Singlish would be an interesting future section. -- creamyhorror June 2006

Singlish and Singapore English

I just found books in the library on Singapore English, ie, the Singapore version of Standard English considered acceptable for "formal" and academic usages in Singapore (ie, the "Mesolectal" version described in this article). There seems to be enough content to write its own article distinct from Singlish. Any views on this proposal?--Huaiwei 12:32, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

lolz i agree. move lah.
Singapore English is proper English used in Singaporean style, whereas Singlish is broken English and includes all the lahs, lehs, lors, Hokkien and Malay words and so on. So I strongly agree on the split. --Terence Ong (T | C) 13:34, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I believe this demarcation is very important and should be reflected in the opening of the article. As far as I'm concerned there are two main kinds of English been used in Singapore:

(1)Standard English - what you get on news programmes on TV, sounds pretty 'standard' as it is based on British English, but there are certainly some differences between the two

(2)Singlish - a form of proliferate local dialect that evolves and develops its own standards (with little intervention from government, which is only concerned with discouraging it but has no business in telling people *how* they should speak it)

Singapore/Singaporean English is to be avoided as some people may use this term as a reference to Standard English, while some others would interpret it as Singlish (presumably as a more intuitive interpretation for those people who make more frequent use of Singlish in their daily lives, as compared Standard/Normal English). I think it would be very bad if other articles on Wikipedia have a tendency to point to this article whenever the use of English in Singapore is concerned. Would they even think that Singlish is used for news reporting on the national TV?!

Anyway, I have taken the liberty to set up a disambiguation page for Singapore English with a very brief description, now at least people who get to that page in future have a chance to consider what exactly are they looking for. I understand that there is a page for Standard English, but I created a page for Singapore English (Standard English) anyway. Now people can either continue to build that new page, or add a Singapore section for Standard English.

As an afterthought, now that we have such an elaborate page for Singlish on its own, but comparatively little coverage for Standard English in the local context, doesn't this reflect the significance of Singlish in Singapore? ;) Arkansaw (talk) 09:38, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

What are the differences between "Standard Singapore English" and "Standard English"? I'm not sure if there is enough difference or reference material to justify a separate article. It's just a difference in accent. --Vsion (talk) 00:11, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Article issues

Okay, I think that this article needs some major reworking. Right now, although it does explicitly say at the beginning that Singlish is a language in its own right, it is not treated throught the article as a separate linguistic system from Standard English -- which it definitely is, although SLSH (SingLiSH) is influenced by StdE.

Pretty much the whole article is focussed on documenting SLSH by its differences from StdE, rather than defining it as an independent subject. If a topic isn't mentioned in the article, are we to assume it is identical to English in that regard?

Some might make the argument that given the history and current status of SLSH, the article should be written that way.

However, Limburgish and Afrikaans, in their articles, are not described by how they differ from Dutch, but rather as independent systems in their own right. Thus, if some aspect of grammar or syntax is not mentioned at Limburgish language, then it is an unknown. It's not expected that we assume it must treat that aspect the same as does Dutch. This page, on the other hand, implies that the only differences are the ones that are mentioned and that in every other way, SLSH is identical to StdE. This is most certainly not true. (I don't use the common abbreviation SgEn or SgCE or SCE because, although it is often used by creolists who recognise Singlish as a language, it uses qualifiers to describe "English", when there is a widely-used, although admittedly "folkish" name for it)

I have seen this used before, whether consciously or unconsciously, to attempt to diminish the fact that a language system is separate, it is independent, it has its own rules (even when they might coincide with the rules of another, closely-related language system). It seems to be used on most articles about English-based creole languages (ECLs), as well as creole-like dialects and sociolects (I would classify AAVE and Latino English as creole-like sociolects, but linguists don't agree yet about the classification of those varieties). In fact, it is often stated on our pages about ECLs that they are "English-based creoles" without mentioning that they are languages, a fact accepted nearly universally by modern linguists -- this is actually mentioned on Creole language as a diminishing tactic. Such a tactic is similar to attempts to undermine the valor of extra-Eurasian languages by referring to them as "dialects", a practice now largely associated in the Anglosphere with a colonial past, eg. "They speak a number of Bantu dialects there", "He spoke some Indian dialect or another", "The people in that town mostly speak in the local aboriginal dialect", and the name of a book in my own collection, "A dictionary of some Tuamotuan dialects of the Polynesian language". In each of these cases, the "dialect" which is the referrent can often be a very unique language -- Gikuyu or Maasai can be called "Bantu dialects", but they are without a question independent languages. Same for, say, Tamil and Hindi, which could both be termed "Indian dialects" although they are not even genetically related, or Gamilraay and Murrin Patha as "aboriginal dialects" (I don't believe they're related, but Australian linguistics is not my primary area of interest, unless it involves corpus building). And Tuamotuan is certainly not a dialect of any "Polynesian language" (it has itself been divided into several languages by linguists but again, not my primary area of interest).

Most of the content of the article is useful and good, it just needs to be reorganised. Currently, it's organised as "How is SLSH different from StdE?" when it should be "What is a good linguistic description of SLSH?". Yes, to a certain extent we probably should do the "documenting differences" thing, but I think its role in the article should be very, very limited -- for example, in the discussion of prosody, and in the discussion of modal particles, and of phonemic tone, it is definitely good to contrast with StdE, given that it is the lexifier language and these features are relatively unique among ECLs (with the exception of Manglish, I can't think of one that makes such extensive use of modal particles for example; I don't know about prosody; but I know that there are a few ECLs out there which make much more extensive use of phonemic tone). --Node 18:08, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree 100%. I wrote much of the phonology and grammar sections and I admit that when I wrote it, I was indeed more focused on giving a laundry list of StdE/SgE differences than a description of SgE in its own right. I agree that this would be changed.
Another problem would of course be a lack of sources. This article generally doesn't cite sources, and examples are given "on the fly". This should probably be remedied as well. -- ran (talk) 18:24, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

The typical Singaporean's view of Singlish

Whalau eh. This page of Wikipedia ah, sure got a lot of cock inside leh. As a Singaporean ah, I think, hor, that this is our unique culture, you know. Sure, the gah'men has tried a lot of ways for Singaporeans like us to speak proper Engrish ah, but oso got no cock effect on our younger generations, what. So I say ah, Singlish also can pass like other languages like Latin and the like. At least a Greek can understand a Greek, but the Greek cannot possibly understand the "Proper Singlish" we Singaporeans speak one what... Like German, you cannot expect an American to hear German and understand what cock he's saying without learning the language first what, right?

Let me translate into proper English, lah, if you really "catch no ball" (do not understand a single bit).

Humph. This page of Wikipedia has a lot of irrelevant things in it. As a Singaporean, I think that this(speaking Singlish) is our unique culture, you know. Sure, the government has tried a lot of ways for Singaporeans like us to speak proper English, but it still hasn't died down on our younger generations yet. So I believe Singlish is almost equivalent to Latin and the like in a way that a Greek can understand Greek, but the Greek cannot understand Singlish. Like German, you cannot expect an American to hear German and understand what he's saying without first learning the language, right?

Don't you think someone should mention origins of "wahlao", which derives from the obscene "wah lan"? - hws

lah/ar inconsitent example

"Although lah can appear nearly anywhere, it cannot appear with a yes-no question." However, the example given is not a "yes-no question": Where are you ar