Singlish: What I Think Happened
I couldn’t write about bilingualism and Singapore without talking about Singlish, especially when I’m back and surrounded by it.
Singlish is a version of English without typical grammatical structure incorporating words from Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, a couple of Chinese dialects and many uniquely Singaporean sounds.
From what I understand, Singlish is a creole language. What is a creole language?
From wikipedia:
“A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the mixing and simplifying of different languages at a fairly sudden point in time: often, a pidgin transitioned into a full-fledged language.”
To be honest, I find Singlish tacky-sounding and kind of crude. BUT, I totally love how it is uniquely Singaporean. I feel that it’s the best way to showcase how racially melded we are and how we have developed as a society.
Many Singaporeans from my parents’ generation don’t know English. This was just 50-60 years ago. That generation included the three main races in Singapore – Chinese, Malays and Indians.
To communicate with each other, people picked up phrases in each other’s language through their daily exchanges and everyone simplified their sentences (reducing grammar and vocabulary) to make it more accessible. For the things they don’t know how to express, they filled in with their own languages. Using this very cooperative and accommodating way of speech, they understood each other. This is known as pidgin language.
As time went on, later generations got better access to education and English became their common language. By this time, a part of each race’s language is already in the public language pool. The simplified (grammar-less) way we spoke to each other had already been established.
Now, we all know that languages are hard to pick up, the nuances of grammar even more so. There was a tendency to use English with the syntax of our mother tongues or the simplified structure rather than the more complex proper English structure.
Besides, when we know more than one language, we tend to mix languages when we speak. So, the more commonly used and phonetically amusing words in the respective languages stuck.
The result? Singlish was born!
I’m sure it happened very organically and gradually, and I’m sure I missed several things. Please know that I derived all these through observation as a Singaporean, so it’s not by research and by no means the absolute truth. It’s a personal account. Nevertheless, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it. I find it all very interesting.
As a tiny nation, we don’t have much to show off (aside from our colorful cuisine, resourcefulness and population density *winks*), but this is original and ours, regardless of race, language or religion. And it’s pretty darn wonderful to me.
