This article from 8 Days illustrates an example of spoken or written Singapore Colloquial English, also known as Singlish. 8 Days is a local weekly magazine, with its target audience focusing on all ages interested in entertainment about latest news and celebrity gossips, as well as television synopses.
From this article, we can gather some of the predominant features of Singlish which include; the intentional omission of pronouns, verbs and the usage of imperatives. There is a high volume of present continuous being used comparatively to the low usage of present perfective. Nonetheless, Singlish still conforms to the spelling system and pronominal system used by Standard English.
The article displays many key characteristics of Singapore Colloquial English. From the text, there is an example of the omission of the ‘BE’ verb form where the writer wrote, “Singlish, so bad, meh?". In that phrase, the ‘BE’ verb form was totally excluded leaving it with only the subject and adverbial. Another feature of Singlish that can be gathered from the text is the deletion of the subject from the phrase when used in a spoken declarative manner as illustrated by “Don wan, Skius!”. There are also numerous forms of non-Germanic verb structure in Singlish such as “Dun pray pray” and “Abuden” and also the examples of “ah”, “lah”, “one” and “hor” lifted from the article shows the system of specific pragmatic features. Lastly, the phrase “Oi, see what?”, demonstrates the high usage of interrogative structures.
Singlish is a variation of Standard English and we shall attempt to understand why people do use it. The users of Singlish are Singaporeans and the people living around the region. However, the article targets mainly Singaporeans as shown by the evidences found in text. The writer of the article mentioned Ris Low, the infamous former Singapore Miss World pageant winner, and Phua Chu Kang, whom Sinagporens can relate to. Only Singaporeans understand phrases such as “pattern tzuay kuay badminton” coined by them.
A common feature of Singlish is a language of borrowed English because of the adaptation of new words from English and other various local-used dialects and languages such as Hokkien and Malay. With the influx of new and foreign cultures, Singlish will see a paradigm shift as it continues to evolve, borrowing and adapting new words. Moreover, with this shift, there will also be differing standards of English spoken by various people from different walks of life in Singapore. Nonetheless, Singaporeans today actually do take pride in speaking Singlish as it is considered the heartland language where everyone seem to be able to use to connect with one another.
With Singapore being a fast-paced society, Singlish seems to be the “way-to-go” for the busy metropolitans. It can also be said that Singlish is a useful new linguistic form that can be applied in new communications technology. This can be seen in the short-forms we use extensively to express ourselves and our emotions to people on the internet that demands speed. Also, this new linguistic form is applicable when we will continuously have newer and newer things and experiences to talk about. Singlish, thus, provides an alternative to the adaptation to the constraints caused by this phenomenon.
To conclude, the examples listed earlier on have illustrated how knowledge of language changes and varies with examples such as the intentional omission of pronouns, verbs as well as usage of imperatives. All these changes are a result of convenience, as well as the evolving culture-infused civilisations. Last but not least, we must keep up with the new communications technology by constantly evolving and adapting our language.
This discussion would provide the students with the basic knowledge on why and how these changes are brought about in the language we so frequently use. Exposing the students to the reasons behind the changes, and the fact that these changes are inevitable and ongoing with life and its advances, would give them an additional platform to better understand, and also fully appreciate the multicultural and multilingual society we are residing in. This would be a good stimulation for the students’ learning interests in the subject, which will aid in future teaching.
