Singapore English

This book offers readers a new way of thinking about the unique syntactic, semantic and phonological structure of Singapore English.

Over the past few decades, Singapore English has been emerging as an independent variety of English with its own distinct style of pronunciation, grammar and word usage. All the findings presented in the book are illustrated with extensive examples from one hour of recorded conversational data from the Lim Siew Hwee Corpus of Informal Singapore Speech, as well as some extracts from the NIE Corpus of Spoken Singapore Speech and recent blogs. In addition, usage patterns found in the data are summarised, to provide a solid foundation for the reported occurrence of various features of the language. A full transcript of the data is included in the final chapter of the book.

Singapore English: A grammatical description provides a vivid account of current, contemporary Singapore English, complementing older seminal accounts of this variety. Drawing primarily on the Grammar of Spoken Singapore English Corpus, which comprises naturally-occurring conversational speech, the contributions in this volume not only provide comprehensive and systematic descriptions of the structural features characterising colloquial Singapore English of the young, native speaker of today, but also propose the likely substrate sources of these features through insightful linguistic and historical examination. Clearly illustrating the particular rules of grammar that characterise Singapore English as a variety in its own right, this volume presents its evolution as a perfectly natural linguistic phenomenon which is best understood within the multiethnic and multilingual society that Singapore is and has been for the past two centuries. Theoretical linguists, sociolinguists, dialectologists, variationists, typologists and creolists, as well as those involved in education and policy-making, should find this description relevant and vital.

A semantic, pragmatic and cultural interpretation of Singapore English, offering a fascinating glimpse of Singaporean life.

In recent years the study of English and its global varieties has grown rapidly as a field of study. The English language in Singapore, famous for its vernacular known as 'Singlish', is of particular interest to linguists because it takes accent, dialect and lexical features from a wide range of languages including Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien and Tamil, as well as being influenced by the Englishes of Britain, Australia and America. This book gives a comprehensive overview of English in Singapore by setting it within a historical context and drawing on recent developments in the field of indexicality, world Englishes and corpus research. Through application of the indexicality framework Jakob Leimgruber offers readers a new way of thinking about and analysing the unique syntactic, semantic and phonological structure of Singapore English. This book is ideal for researchers and advanced students interested in Singapore and its languages.

English in Singapore provides an up-to-date, detailed and comprehensive investigation into the various issues surrounding the sociolinguistics of English in Singapore. Rather than attempting to cover the usual topics in an overview of a variety of English in a particular country, the essays in this volume are important for identifying some of the most significant issues pertaining to the state and status of English in Singapore in modern times, and for doing so in a treatment that involves a critical evaluation of work in the field and new and thought-provoking angles for reviewing such issues in the context of Singapore in the twenty-first century. The contributions address the historical trajectory of English (past, present and possible future), its position in relation to language policy and multiculturalism, the relationship between the standard and colloquial varieties, and how English can and should be taught. This book is thus essential reading for scholars and students concerned with how the dynamics of the English language are played out and managed in a modern society such as Singapore. It will also interest readers who have a more general interest in Asian studies, the sociology of language, and World Englishes.

In a social setting where speakers with several languages interact extensively, a major source of variation in Colloquial Singapore English comes from the complex interaction between crosslinguistic influences and various social and linguistic factors. By unifying both social and linguistic aspects of the phenomenon through the use of multivariate analyses like logistic regressions and Poisson regressions, this book represents a novel approach to the study of crosslinguistic influence in Colloquial Singapore English. As multivariate analyses provide us with information regarding the relative strengths of each social and linguistic factor, they are useful tools that allow us to have a more nuanced understanding of crosslinguistic influence in contact situations. Linguistic features from a variety of linguistic domains – morphology, semantics, and discourse – will be quantified, and statistical analyses will be run in R to determine the degree to which various social and linguistic factors affect the extent of crosslinguistic influence. Well-known Singlish features like the optionality of past tense and plural marking, the unique meanings of already, got, and one, and discourse particles lah, leh, and lor, are analyzed using this approach. The statistical modeling of these features is a first step towards creating a unified framework to understanding crosslinguistic influence.

Combining the World Englishes framework with First Language Acquisition methodology, this book investigates children’s acquisition of L1 English in the context of multilingual Singapore, one of the traditional Kachruvian Outer Circle or ESL countries. The book investigates language choice, use, and dominance in Singaporean families, identifies common linguistic characteristics of L1 Singapore English, as well as the acquisitional route that Singaporean children take. It discusses characteristics at the different levels of language organization, i.e., phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical, and pragmatic features, drawing on a variety of systematically elicited data and Praat-based acoustic analyses. Comparing the results to similar data obtained from children living in England (both mono- and bi-/multilingual), the book also sheds light on how the acquisitional steps taken by Singaporean children differ from or are similar to traditional native speakers of English and children from immigrant families in England.