Ethnic and gender variation in the use of Colloquial Singapore English discourse particles

Jakob R E Leimgruber,Jun Jie Lim,Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales,Mie Hiramoto

doi:10.1017/s1360674320000453

Abstract

Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to another. This study uses theCorpus of Singapore English Messages(CoSEM), a large-scale corpus of texts composed by Singaporeans and sent using electronic messaging services, to investigate gender and ethnic factors as predictors of particle use. The results suggest a strong gender effect as well as several particle-specific ethnic effects. More generally, our study underlines the special nature of the grammatical class of discourse particles in CSE, which is open to new additions as the sociolinguistic and pragmatic need for them develops.

Highlights

Among the better-known features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, known as Singlish) are its discourse particles: derived from various substrate languages, they are monosyllabic and typically restricted to the clause-final position
While many of these particles have been described in a fair bit of detail, there remain uncertainties as to their exact behaviour in use and their variation across social factors. Ethnicity is one such factor which has attracted some attention (Platt 1987; Begum & Kandiah 1997; Gupta 2006; Leimgruber 2009; Smakman & Wagenaar 2013; Botha 2018), but the corpora involved were often small and not revealing enough for a proper variationist analysis. This is what we attempt to address in this article, using CoSEM, the Corpus of Singapore English Messages, a large corpus of text messages gathered from 2017 to 2019
It is worth adding that ethnicity and gender alone do not account for the whole picture of variation in particle use, or in CSE in general: our model accounted for age, on which we are not focusing in this article for lack of space

Summary

Introduction

Among the better-known features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, known as Singlish) are its discourse particles: derived from various substrate languages, they are monosyllabic and typically restricted to the clause-final position (see e.g. Wee 2003; Starr forthcoming). While many of these particles have been described in a fair bit of detail, there remain uncertainties as to their exact behaviour in use and their variation across social factors Ethnicity is one such factor which has attracted some attention (Platt 1987; Begum & Kandiah 1997; Gupta 2006; Leimgruber 2009; Smakman & Wagenaar 2013; Botha 2018), but the corpora involved were often small and not revealing enough for a proper variationist analysis. While the Malays were still in the majority in the first census in 1824, three years later immigrants from southern China had arrived in such numbers that they became the dominant ethnic group in the city (Leimgruber 2013a: 3) These Chinese migrants, came from regions within China that were ‘perceived as culturally and linguistically distinctive’ (Chew 2013: 47). It took several decades for Mandarin to become relevant in the local ecology: it was used as a home language by a mere 0.1 per cent of the population in 1957 (Kuo 1980; see figure 1), and only after the launch of the Speak Mandarin Campaign in 1979 did

Results

Discussion

Conclusion