Wired wrote something that got me tinking a bit. I’ll quote in excerpts, the full article is here. I’m more interested in the Singlish portions.
How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand
An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don’t get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.
It’s the 1.3 billion people can’t be wrong thing. If more Chinese speak in their Chinglish, they would be the majority. We can’t say the majority of English language speakers are speaking it wrongly, can we?
In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced “tink,” and theories is “tee-oh-rees.”
Dude, it’s Singapore English, not Singaporean English. I never heard of tee-oh-rees in Singapore anyway. Do we say that? I don’t tink so!
One noted feature of Singlish is the use of words like ah, lah, or wah at the end of a sentence to indicate a question or get a listener to agree with you. They’re each pronounced with tone – the linguistic feature that gives spoken Mandarin its musical quality – adding a specific pitch to words to alter their meaning. (If you say “xin” with an even tone, it means “heart”; with a descending tone it means “honest.”) According to linguists, such words may introduce tone into other Asian-English hybrids.
I haven’t thought of the ah, lah, loh stuff this way leh. To me, it was added to sound more casual and to fit in. If everyone doesn’t add this, no one would use it. It’s just to fit in. But our government launched a campaign to go against it – clearly not fitting in well enough.
And it’s possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out “Environmental sanitation needs your conserve,” maybe conservation isn’t so necessary.
I tink we’re in some sort of transition. If the Chinese can end up standardizing English by bastardizing the current standard of English, so be it. We would see a bunch of English purist crying but hey, we switched old English to middle English to our modern English. Yeah, it took ages but today we are experiencing an acceleration on technology advancements, globalization etc.. Maybe we forgotten that language developments can accelerate too.
Welcome to post-modern Asianglish.
It’s Singaporean English, just like British English, Australian English and American English.
@nocturne: Singapore is used as an adjective too, therefore we say “Singapore Idol” instead of “Singaporean Idol”. “American Idol” is correct, however “Singaporean Idol” is not right.
Likewise, we say “Singapore economy”, “Singapore cuisine”, “Singapore culture”, “American economy”, “American cuisine” and “American culture”.
I think this post is nonsense. I mean, I am from the Philippines, and we also have a thing called “Taglish”. But if we speak to Americans would we speak that way? Of course no! So this post sucks because only if Americans change their way of speaking English that would be the evolution. But hey, who said Americans have the correct accent or words?
@MJ: I change the way I speak in English too. It’s a natural switch to me, when speaking to friends, I tend to match their Singlish and when speaking to foreigners I don’t use Singlish because they probably won’t get it. But the point is when you speak in Singlish or Taglish too often, you may get too used to it and have troubles switching.
“Dude, it’s Singapore English, not Singaporean English. I never heard of tee-oh-rees in Singapore anyway. Do we say that? I don’t tink so!”
– Let me just say that I have heard this plenty of times, being born in Singapore, studying there for 4 years, and living in the U.S.
@KahWee: This article was very interesting and personally I believe that there’s really nothing wrong with the way people want to speak. Yes you do have to meet certain standards when speaking to certain people but that’s the way society has shaped us to be. Proper English has become “the American English” or “the British English” and we do not have much say to that. When you say that Singaporeans say “Singapore economy”, the proper term stated in the news or overseas is actually “Singaporean economy” or “Singaporean cuisine” or “Singaporean culture”. “Singapore Idol” could be an exception due to the fact that it is more or less a globalized show just like “American Idol”, “Indonesian Idol” etc. Hence you could say that MediaCorp would want to make it a more localized form by basically naming it singapore’s show of the ‘Idol’ series — “Singapore Idol”. That’s just my opinion.
@MJ: You’re right, there is no reason to say that Americans have the “right” accent or form of speaking. That’s how society has shaped us and created the norms for us, and everyone just accepts it. Just like how people idolize America as a paradise country where you can do what you want and say what you want — that kind of turns me off quite a bit. Because even though there is such a thing as freedom of speech and liberty, it is not a place where you are free to do anything in the world. There’s always cultural and societal norms you have to meet. Every country defines its own “freedom of speech”, really.
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