Abstract
Abstract: Colloquial Singapore English is an outer‐circle variety that exhibits contact‐induced linguistic change. It has been characterized as the L variant in diglossic opposition to standard English. In this paper, we address two related issues: (1) the extent to which the Singapore English diglossia is supported by corpus data, and (2) the extent to which the diglossia is reducible to register variation. We investigate the usage pattern of two linguistic variables which have acquired novel grammatical meanings, and show that our data support the Singapore English diglossia, but the variation is greater than what is normal in register variation. The diglossia of which one variant is an outer‐circle variety does not reduce easily to register variation.
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