Lisa Lim

“Singlish”: Used and Abused

Abstract The term “Singlish” figures prominently in local discussions of English in Singapore. But because the term has been used by different people to mean different things, this has resulted in (undetected) confusion, leading to discussions where not much progress is being made. In this paper, we first attempt to tear apart the various meanings of “Singlish”. We then discuss how these different uses of “Singlish”, and, by implication, its contrast with Standard English, also embody a number of assumptions about the nature of language, culture, and society, and how some of these assumptions turn out to be fallacious. In many ways, the “Singlish” issue mirrors similar recent language debates in the UK and USA. Our discussion highlights the academic as well as advocacy work that linguists must continue to engage in, to bring about a more (socio)linguistically sophisticated public, and to find ways to make public discussion about English in Singapore better-informed.

Contact and shift

INTRODUCTION There are good reasons to include the field of language shift and endangerment in a study of languages in contact. For one thing, language shift and language endangerment are themselves consequences of contact. Language shift, which is the replacement of one language by another as a primary means of communication and socialisation within a community, is a common response of communities in the face of competition from a regionally and socially more powerful language. In more extreme cases, language shift can lead to language endangerment and – eventually – obsolescence, when a language is no longer used by any community in the world. Second, in the course of shift and endangerment, outcomes of contact can still be observed, which are almost always illuminating for understanding the factors at play in such contact situations. Scholars usually date the beginnings of formal identification and study of language maintenance and shift to Joshua Fishmans (1964) work. Since then, and especially in the last two decades, this field of scholarship – particularly for endangered languages – has seen immense growth. A few significant funding bodies have been supporting a large number of projects documenting endangered languages, resulting not only in the documentation of many hitherto unknown languages but also in phenomenal growth in the field in scholarship, methodology, technical expertise and equipment, as well as attention to issues of ethics. In the first sections of this chapter, we provide an overview of the essential points and issues to be aware of when engaging with this topic; for full and comprehensive coverage readers are pointed to the volumes mentioned in the list of further reading. We then look in greater detail at the present situation of the Malays of Sri Lanka, an interesting case study for the various sociolinguistic factors that impacted on their choices, leading to situations of maintenance, shift and endangerment. We also return to the issue of identity alignment, addressed in Chapter 4, when a community is faced with choosing to keep or discard languages.

Contact and ecology

INTRODUCTION At the outset of this book we underlined the significant role that ecology plays in the study of languages in contact. The ecology paradigm, a metaphor from population genetics and biology, has been developed most recently in linguistic study by Salikoko Mufwene (2001, 2008). The earliest instances of its invocation – Voegelin, Voegelin and Schutz (1967) and Haugen (1971), and later Muhlhausler (1996) – use it in the sense of the social environment in which a language is spoken. Mufwene (2001: 153) is also influenced by its usage in macroecology as a cover term for diverse factors which are both external and internal to a species and bear on its evolution. These include population size, habitat requirements and genetic variation, as well as differences in initial conditions, stochastic (i.e. random) events, time lags, processes operating on different time scales and spatial subdivisions. In this chapter we engage in a detailed examination of the role of ecology behind two linguistic features: particles and tone. These features are germane to this book because they are extremely susceptible to contact. But, even more pertinently for this chapter, we highlight how a full appreciation of what happens with particles and tone requires us to look at the external factors which construe the ecology that creates the conditions for the dynamics of contact, and the close interplay between them. More specifically, we demonstrate how the identification of the substrates for certain features needs to call on an examination of demographic factors such as immigration patterns and population make-up at different points in time, as well as language policy. We also see how the founder principle in the ecology paradigm helps to shed light on otherwise puzzling patterns in the restructured variety. These linguistic features are extremely interesting to examine because they are features which can be seen to be quite distinctive for Asia. They are not exclusive to Asia, of course: particles are found in numerous languages of the world, and virtually all languages in Africa are tonal, with several clusters of languages with tones occurring in South, Central and North America.

Singapore: Language situation

Singapores population is characterized by a high degree of multilingualism, with four official languages and numerous vernacular varieties. As such, it is a true laboratory for sociolinguistic enterprises. It is rich in language planning and policy making, shows complex patterns of polyglossia, and code mixing is very common.