Singapore English Research Articles

Rethinking language teacher education in the Global Englishes paradigm: the Cline of Glocality in Singapore

ABSTRACT Education in Singapore is set against a background that is ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse. Singapore’s deliberate language policy and planning saw the birth of English-knowing bilinguals who are proficient in both English and their ethnically ascribed mother tongues. This has given rise to Singaporeans whose English proficiency level allows them to be globally competent and whose use of English in the local context has also led to the development of Singapore Englishes (i.e. Standard Singapore English and Colloquial Singapore English or Singlish) operating together in what Low and Pakir describe as the Cline of Glocality. Adopting the Global Englishes paradim, this article discusses how language teacher education needs to be rethought in order to capture the nuancing in the uses of Singapore Englishes in order to achieve the delicate balance between global competence of its users and the local realities surrounding its use.

Singapore hawker centres

Abstract This paper is a sociolinguistic study of the linguistic landscape of signboards in Singapore hawker centres. It examines the language(s) displayed on the signboards of 2,145 stalls in the 20 largest hawker centres in Singapore. Hawker centres in Singapore are open-air eating places patronised by thousands of people each day. With less government intervention in the languages that can be displayed on hawker centre signboards, the signs reflect the languages used and identities adopted by the masses in a multilingual setting. This language ecology enables us to observe how languages interact at individual and societal levels in hawker centres and how linguistic diversity is maintained despite the apparent widespread use of English in Singapore. We examine how besides the monolingual, bilingual and multilingual and hybrid signboards, hawker centres are unique habitats in this language ecology where non-Mandarin dialects are preserved, and traditional Chinese characters are commonly seen, in a globalised Singapore. The hawker centres showcase a linguistic landscape of identity, diversity, and continuity.

Spiaking Singlish: The politics of ludic English in Singapore

AbstractThis article is a case study on how Singaporean intellectuals articulate resistant language ideologies by enregistering the local vernacular, Singlish. The case in point is Gwee Li Sui's 2018 companion Spiaking Singlish, lauded as the first book to be written in Singlish about Singlish. It is argued that in tactically leveraging Singlish in a folk-lexicographical project, Gwee takes the vernacular to the third indexical order; and in so doing, he performs a ludic and extreme form of Singlish through which an everyday tongue turns into a fetish object. Contextualising Gwee's polemics within his tension with the language establishment in Singapore, the article highlights the ethical dilemma implicit in the celebration of languages speaking to an egalitarian ethos, suggesting that in enunciating a vernacular on the order of reflexive performance, intellectuals may inadvertently fashion it into a more elitist language than that which is spoken on the streets. (Singlish, Singapore, enregisterment, performativity, indexicality)

Review of Leimgruber (2013): Singapore English. Structure, variation and usage. Studies in English Language

Review of Leimgruber (2013): Singapore English. Structure, variation and usage. Studies in English Language

“In the past, we hear that a lot”: Features of and responses to tense and aspect in written Singaporean Academic English

This study investigates the particularities of verb use in written Singaporean Academic English and considers a response from an English for Specific Purposes perspective. It builds on previous research on verb features of spoken Singaporean English, finding many prominent features in spoken Singaporean English missing in written Singaporean Academic English. However, this study suggests that written Singaporean Academic English alters the grammatical categories of tense and aspect and is, then, able to flexibly express the information of tense and aspect in creative and meaningful ways where many instructors might only see grammatical “mistakes”. The paper discusses the ramifications of this for educators, arguing for an approach that simultaneously recognizes the functionality of this verb system and trains students to be capable in the verb systems of other dialects for pragmatic purposes.

Repositioning Singlish in Singapore’s language-in-education policies

ABSTRACT Singapore’s language-in-education policies have always prescribed that only a standard variety of English be allowed in teaching and learning. This view of upholding a standard has been pervasive not only in education but also throughout Singapore’s society. In this article, we review Singapore’s language policy, emphasizing the functional polarization of languages ideology that serves as its basis, and discuss the resultant natural emergence of the key linguistic marker of Singaporean national identity – Singlish. Charting the journey and growth of Singlish’s role and status from both official and socio-cultural perspectives, we highlight that changes can be observed. It is, thus, imperative that Singlish’s place in language classrooms and the affordances that Singlish has for language learning be reconsidered. Following a discussion of salient Singlish features, highlighting their appropriacy in social situations where standard English features are not and the fact that many Singapore English features are recognizably shared by both Singlish and Singapore Standard English, we propose a linguistic feature-based contrastive analysis approach for Singapore’s English language classrooms. At the core, we call for a review of Singapore’s language-in-education policies and the support of various stakeholders in the bid to nurture confident and effective English language users of the future.

Korean Children’s Attitudes toward Varieties of English: The Role of Age and English Learning Environment

This study investigates young Korean children’s attitudes toward three English varieties: American English (AmE), Singapore English (SiE), and Korean English (KoE). A total of 42 Korean children participated in this study. For data analysis purposes, the results were categorized according to the children’s age and their experience of exposure to formal English learning. In addition to this, 30 Singaporean children were also involved in the study, and their results were compared with the results of the younger group of Korean children. A mixed methodological approach, which included a modified verbal guise technique appropriate for use with children and semi-structured interviews, was also adopted. The results show that 5-year-old Korean and Singaporean children do not prefer one specific variety of English more than the other varieties of English. However, this was not the case for 12-year-old Korean children. These older Korean children preferred AmE and SiE more than KoE, and the “speaker’s pronunciation” was considered to be the critical feature in determining these attitudes. The findings suggest that Korean children’s developing attitudes toward a particular variety of English emerge sometime during their elementary school years.

A Corpus-Based Study on Construction of “Anger Adjectives + Prepositions” in World Englishes

Anger as one of the basic emotions has attracted much attention. In the construction of “Anger adjectives + prepositions”, the temporal duration of the Anger adjectives is closely related to their prepositional collocates. Differences in the use of the Anger adjectives and their prepositional collocates might be captured in the world English varieties. The corpora used in this study cover eight varieties of English. The five varieties of English used in Canada, Philippines, Singapore, India and Nigeria are from the International Corpus of English (ICE). The China English corpus (ChiE) consists of news texts crawled from six Chinese English media. American English is taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British English is taken from British National Corpus (BNC). By investigating the use of the Anger adjectives and their prepositional collocates in the eight varieties of English, this paper finds that, on the continuums of the temporal duration of Anger adjectives, most varieties of English are closer to American English, whereas only Singapore English is close to British English. The distribution of Anger adjectives in the English varieties is largely in accordance with the Concentric Circles of world Englishes whereas the continuums of the temporal duration of emotions present a new insight into their relations.

Sociophonetic variation in English /l/ in the child-directed speech of English-Malay bilinguals

Three realisations of syllable-final /l/ have been described in previous work on Singapore English: vocalised-l (or deleted-l in some phonetic contexts; the local norms), dark-l (a form associated with the exonormative standards), and clear-l (a Malay-derived phonetic trait observed in the speech of some English-Malay bilinguals). This study examined whether, how and why Singaporean English-Malay bilinguals vary their English /l/ in their child-directed speech, and whether the phonetic variation, if any, could be socially-conditioned. The laterals in the English child-directed speech of ten father-mother dyads with their preschoolers were analysed using auditory and acoustic methods. All participants were simultaneous or early English-Malay bilinguals. The findings revealed that in informal contexts, both mothers and fathers used a relatively clearer /l/ in all syllable positions. Contrastingly, in formal contexts that involved teaching and learning, the coda laterals of mothers were significantly darker, thereby exhibiting positional contrast between onset and coda laterals. They also produced significantly more vocalised-l in these contexts. Fathers, however, did not show differentiation in the darkness of the laterals, nor did their laterals show significant positional differences in formal contexts, although some fathers of younger children did produce more vocalised-l than they did in informal contexts. The variation observed was discussed by exploring the potential socio-indexical meanings of these variants of /l/ within the context of variationist accounts of Singapore English and by drawing parallels with socially-conditioned variation in bilectal monolinguals and ethnolect speakers. Differences between maternal and paternal CDS patterns could be attributed to gender roles and cultural expectations of mothers’ dominant role in child-rearing, and may also be a result of and enabled by Malay women’s potentially more complex repertoire range.

Convergence in contact grammaticalisation in Singapore English: the case of already1

The continuous co-existence in Colloquial Singapore English (Singlish) of the past tense alongside already, an aspect marker expressing iamitive functions (Olsson 2013), has not, to present knowledge, received an adequate explanation in terms of diachronic change. The two forms are often seen to overlap in function, but a more intensive survey reveals that only the completive functions overlap, the non-completive functions accounting for the majority of uses in present-day Singapore English. The bias in functions is considered to be the result of a renovation in contact grammaticalization, or a convergence towards the lexifier, often expressed in terms of decreolization in creole languages. The present study considers quantitative data of both completive and non-completive already across four diachronic time periods, concluding that the constant diglossic presence of the standard lexifier since colonization contributed to the convergence shown.

Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting Tense Variation in Singapore English


 
 
 Despite English being the primary official language of Singapore, many of its citizens show deviations from Standard Singapore English (SSE) in speech or writing. In particular, it has been noted that Singapore English speakers may produce non-standard tense morphology, often omitting verbal past-tense markers in past-tense contexts. However, a couple of open questions remain: are there any social or external factors driving this variation, and is this variation morphological or phonological? To address these questions, I asked participants to complete a verbal interview and written questionnaire designed to probe how they inflect verbs, and examined if conformity to SSE is predicted by age, sex, or mother tongue. The results suggest that non-standard tense use does not differ along these lines. They also support earlier claims that tense marker omission in SSE is phonological, rather than morphological, for a majority of speakers, but that there is a small group for whom the variation may be morphological.
 
 

Review of Buschfeld (2020): Children’s English in Singapore: Acquisition, Properties, and Use

This article reviews Children’s English in Singapore: Acquisition, Properties, and Use EUR 132.309781138708877

Basicallyin Singapore English

While much has been written about the unique set of discourse particles in colloquial Singapore English, other discourse markers which belong to the common core of English have been neglected. This paper deals with basically, a rather recent addition to the paradigm of discourse markers which typically move along the following clines in their development: clause-internal adverbial > sentence adverbial > discourse particle; scope within the proposition > scope over the proposition > scope over discourse. This paper will use the evidence from the Singaporean subcorpus of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to trace the functions and contexts for basically and to determine whether the grammaticalization clines proposed on the basis of British English also hold for an Outer Circle variety such as Singapore English with its rich array of indigenized discourse particles.

The Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM)

AbstractThis article introduces the first version of the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a 3.6‐million‐word monitor corpus of online text messages collected between 2016 and 2019, compiled and managed by a group of scholars who share an interest in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) research. The paper explains the motivations behind developing a new corpus for the investigation of CSE. It also documents the process of compiling and organizing CoSEM and describes the corpus's initial structure and composition. We further discuss the social variables used in tagging the data, as well as ethical challenges, advantages, and disadvantages unique to online message datasets. In addition, we present preliminary analyses of two selected CSE features: (1) the Hokkien‐derived expression (bo)jio and (2) sentence‐final adverbs (already, also, only). As CoSEM is an ongoing project, we conclude the article with notes on future directions.

Acceptability of Standard Indian English Morpho-Syntactic Features: An Empirical Study

The emergence of varieties of English over the years has been the outcome of some prolonged and sustained struggles for their acceptance and linguistic legitimacy. These varieties which include not only Indian, Pakistani, Singaporean English but also American, Australian, New Zealand, Welsh, Scottish and Irish English among others have had to struggle against the perceived superiority of British English to assert their legitimacy even among their people (Choudhury, 2018). We have a well-documented record of the struggles for linguistic independence of American English. Studies conducted among the users of different varieties of English have, in recent times, shown greater acceptability of their own varieties of English. However, the acceptability is not universal and a large number of users of the language still regard their own varieties to be “low” in comparison to the native varieties. Baumgardner states that had similar studies on American English been done in the nineteenth century, a similar disparity of views would have been found (Baumgardner, 1996 , p. 262). Although Indian English has gained legitimacy as a variety with its distinct lexical, morpho-syntactic and discourse features, its acceptability among the users of the language needs to be ascertained. The purpose of the study is to examine the acceptability of Standard Indian English usage among the people very closely associated with the English language through an analysis of subject response to a questionnaire comprising Standard Indian English morpho-syntactic items.

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

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.

Changes in the functions of already in Singapore English

Abstract The use of the adverb already in Colloquial Singapore English has long been known as one of the most readily recognizable features defining the contact dialect, marking aspectual nuances such as anterior, completive, inchoative and inceptive functions, as noted by Bao (2005, 2015). Recent observations note that the uses of already as an inchoative marker (distinguishing the adverb as an iamitive) are more frequently found than completive uses across a small, synchronic sample of speakers (Teo 2019). It is perhaps less often recognized, though, that the aspectual use of already co-exists with the variable marking for past tense in Singlish (Ho & Platt 1993), and that both the aspectual adverb and the past tense may be seen to co-occur in the same construction. The frequency of already in its various functions is examined across two corpora, and the relative frequency of completive vs. non-completive functions is quantified diachronically. It is hypothesized that, rather than grammaticalizing onwards to become a past tense marker, as is predictable for some Portuguese creole iamitives (ya ‘already’) (Clements 2006), already is becoming increasingly restricted in its functional range in today’s Singlish, and that its perfect and completive functions may be at a stage of selective renovation by the use of the past tense in Standard Singapore English.

Measures of Adult Knee Function.

Measures of Adult Knee Function.

(Un)democratic Epicene Pronouns in Asian Englishes: A Register Approach

The search for gender equality in language use is one of the most frequently cited cases of linguistic democratization (e.g., Farrelly & Seoane 2012:394). At the grammatical level, this process implies, for example, that pronouns such as generic he used with epicene antecedents are being replaced by singular they or by combined he or she, at least in inner-circle varieties of English. However, outer-circle varieties remain underexplored in this regard. For this reason, this paper analyzes three Asian English varieties, namely Hong Kong English (HKE), Indian English (IndE), and Singapore English (SgE), based on the relevant ICE corpora. More than 58,000 examples were retrieved from the corpora and manually filtered, resulting in 2120 tokens of epicene pronouns. The results show a very different picture for each variety. While overall HKE shows a high preference for the more democratic options they and he or she, IndE and SgE exhibit different patterns. IndE shows singular they in speech, but it is almost non-existent in writing, while in SgE there is a sharp contrast between the most spontaneous spoken register and all other registers. After testing different hypotheses, the findings are explained in socio-cultural terms, as a result of democratization possibly related to women’s movements in those territories.

Overseas Singaporean attitudes towards Singlish

ABSTRACT This qualitative study explores the attitudes of Singaporean undergraduate students living abroad towards the colloquial variety of Singaporean English, also known as Singlish. The data, consisting of eight in-depth individual interviews, and the findings were analysed using a theoretical framework incorporating cognitive, affective and behavioural components of attitude. The findings demonstrate that Singaporeans have a ‘love and hate’ relationship with Singlish. While the distinctiveness of Singlish features allows Singaporeans to recognize and connect with fellow countrymen abroad, serving as a marker of identification and solidarity, it is also viewed as ‘improper’ and ‘a cause of embarrassment’. Singlish is considered a means by which non-Singaporeans can assimilate into the Singaporean community, and yet, it was found that there was an exclusivity about Singlish in that it could only be mastered by Singaporeans. The findings are discussed in relation to the implications that future research can have on attitudes towards Singlish.