‘I’m not west. I’m not east.
So
how leh?’
DEBBIE G. E. HO
Identity in flux: a Singlish speaker’s dilemma
WHILE recent articles and research studies on
Singapore Colloquial English (SCE, or simply
‘Singlish’) have so far tended to focus on the
structure, grammar and the functional roles of
Singlish in Singapore, this paper presents an
insider’s viewpoint of this local variety from a
perspective that incorporates both linguistic
ideology and cultural politics. Focusing on the
spoken version at the basilectal end of the Eng-
lish speech continuum, the article attempts to
explore Singlish from a cultural-political view-
point and challenges popular belief that
Singlish encapsulates an established Singapore
identity. In the process, it throws up some
insights about language, identity and culture.
Based on two significant contributing factors to
the unmarked use of Singlish in Singapore, the
paper argues that – more than just a language
used for wider intra-communication in this
tiny republic and city state – this variety, with
its odd mix of English and local ethnic lan-
guages, mirrors a people who find themselves
struggling with a myriad conflicting and con-
trasting cultures, a people in cultural and lin-
guistic flux, who are still searching – desper-
ately – for an identity, and a language they can
call their own.
Introduction
Some years back, amidst the war waged
against Singlish from certain elite groups in
Singapore, I strongly defended this local vari-
ety of standard Singapore English: now the
unmarked lingua franca for wider intra-com-
munication in modern Singapore. My argu-
ment was that Singlish was not very different
from other varieties of ‘New Englishes’, and
that it added to English a local flavour. In a
sense, I believed then that, as a social glue,
DOI: 10.1017/S026607840600304X
English Today 87, Vol. 22, No. 3 (July 2006). Printed in the United Kingdom © 2006 Cambridge University Press
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 09 May 2011
Singlish reduces ‘the conflict between intelligi-
bility and identity’ (Crystal, 2003:145) among
the different ethnic groups residing in Singa-
pore. Certainly, as is the case expressed by
many writers on the New Englishes (such as
Kachru, 1992; Gupta, 1994; Bokamba, 1992),
Singlish may have provided Singaporeans with
a social identity – the ability to interact as a
social group as one nation. People can identify
themselves as an active functioning unit
because communication is possible through
the use of a single language variety.
When, however, I read Susan Philip’s (2002)
review of a play titled Rosnah, by Haresh
Sharma, about a Singlish speaker’s struggle
with her Singaporean identity in a far-away
Western country, I started reading more exten-
sively about Singlish, language, and cultural
identity.
In the process, the question of whether
DEBBIE G.E. HO holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics
from the University of Adelaide in South Australia,
and is currently a lecturer in English Language &
Applied Linguistics in Universiti Brunei Darussalam
in Brunei. She has taught English as a Second
Language (ESL) for over a decade in educational
institutions in Singapore, Brunei, Australia and
Hong Kong. She has also been involved in
conducting English workshops for language
teachers and development of materials for ESL
students. Her teaching and research interests
include New Englishes, cultural studies, language
acquisition and talk and social structure. She has
published with the ‘RELC Journal’ and
‘GUIDELINES’, an RELC publication for language
teachers. She is in the midst of writing a book on
exploring the sociocultural structure of formal ESL
instruction in classroom talk, which is under
contract with Peter Lang AG.
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Singlish manifests a cultural identity became
less clear. One can say that Singapore is in a
unique position, historically, geographically
and economically – considered the gateway
between east and west. As such, these two cul-
tural complexes play fundamental roles in the
lives of Singaporeans. Do Singlish speakers
exhibit an inclination towards east or west, or
a blurry mish-mash of each, or neither? When-
ever I watch popular Singlish comedy sitcoms
such as Boom Boom Room and Phua Chu Kang,
or local box office hits such as Money No
Enough and Chicken Rice War, where the comic
effect emerges from the deliberate use of
Singlish rather than what is being said, I can-
not help but sense the use of Singlish as a sub-
tle and covert ‘in your face’ kind of provocative
language aimed at, on the one hand, ridiculing
standard British English, and, on the other, the
lack of knowledge its speaker has of the local
ethnic vernaculars, many of which young Sin-
gaporeans today do not identify with – or
indeed speak. For me, exposure to such
instances of Singlish use demonstrates that it
may be a reflection of a people’s rejection of
both the Western and Eastern cultures.
Indeed, it is my argument that Singlish has
become a more complex issue, linguistically
and culturally, than what I originally perceived
it to be. While studies of this variety of English
have traditionally been on its linguistic
descriptions and socio-functional roles (cf.
Platt, Weber & Ho, 1993; Ho & Platt, 1993;
Gupta, 1994), the cultural political aspect of
Singlish has not been adequately explored.
This paper concerns itself with a critical
appreciation of Singlish from a cultural view-
point. Or, in other words, how Singlish reflects
the way its users view themselves and the
world at large. In particular, it provides one
insider’s viewpoint about Singlish from a per-
spective that takes as its central focus the cul-
tural identity of Singaporeans reflected in the
use of Singlish. Specifically, culture here
relates to eastern and western cultures, both of
which play pivotal roles in Singapore. What
then do I mean by cultural identity and its rela-
tionship with language use?
Culture, identity and language
According to Ng (1985:118), culture is ‘how
people perceive themselves and their relation-
ship to the world’. Pennycook (1994) sees the
relationship between culture and identity as
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fundamentally important to the way a commu-
nity’s speakers make sense of their lives in the
world as expressed through their language. In
looking at how English influences the cultural
identity of its speakers he notes (p. 66):
Culture refers to people’s ways of making sense
of their lives… . [L]ooking at the spread of
English and its constant interweaving with local
and global discourses, difficult questions
emerge about how people around the world are
represented and how they can come to
represent themselves in the contested terrain
between their own cultural locations and the
conditions of possibility that arise through
English and its connected discourses.
Following this line of thought, cultural identity
is defined in this paper as Singlish speakers’
attachment to values and beliefs regarding
who they are in relation to the two world cul-
tures they straddle: the West and the East. I say
‘straddle’ because of Singapore’s historical
colonial background, the present strong influ-
ences of Western culture in this cosmopolitan
city state, and its proximity to Eastern culture
in terms of locality and local practices. More-
over, the relationship between culture and lan-
guage here supports Fromkin & Rodman’s
argument (1983) that language cannot be a
culture in itself but rather reflects attitudes
expressed in the culture of a particular people.
Thus, the main question here is: What cultural
identity is reflected through the use of
Singlish?
When Platt, Weber & Ho (1984:201) first
wrote about the New Englishes, they pointed
out that ‘a new English can provide a back-
ground and an identity for its speakers which
an “alien” English, “something from abroad”
never could.’ But does it really? Exactly what
kind of background or identity they mean has
not been elaborated upon nor specified, but
does the mere act of attaching ‘Singapore’ to
‘English’ or appropriating ‘English’ as ‘Singlish’
make for any clearer reflection of Singapore-
ans’ sense of who they are?
It is my argument that, in terms of cultural
identity, Singlish mirrors a people experienc-
ing an identity flux, not really knowing who
they are and what cohesive set of values and
beliefs to attach themselves to as a community.
Furthermore, it is my belief that this flux may
be traced back to two significant contributing
factors in Singapore’s linguistic history:
1 The rejection of standard British English,
and therefore Western imperialist culture
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2 The substantial loss of the vernacular
tongues, particularly among the Chinese
ethnic groups, which made up some 70% of
the total population in Singapore in the late
1970s and early 1980s
These factors will provide the focus for discus-
sion in this paper and their links to the cultural
flux experienced by the Singlish speaker. First
and foremost, however, there is the need to
establish the type of Singlish under discussion
here.
Basilectal Singlish
When it comes to spoken usage, Singapore Eng-
lish exists along a ‘vertical’ speech continuum
envisaged by Ho & Platt (1993). At the top is
the acrolect speaker, whose speech is similar to
British native-speaker proficiency in terms of
grammar and vocabulary. Located along the
middle range of the continuum is the mesolect
speaker, whose speech may contain local
expressions but is otherwise generally standard
in terms of grammar and would be intelligible
to a native-speaker audience. At the basilectal
end of the continuum is the non-standard,
slightly derogatory usage that Valdman
(1983:227) calls semi-pidgin. It is this variety
with which this paper is particularly concerned.
Principally, basilectal Singapore English or
Singapore Colloquial English or Singlish devi-
ates radically from its standard (acrolectal)
equivalent in terms of grammar, vocabulary
and pronunciation, and can be unintelligible to
the native English-speaking world. According
to Gupta (1994:17), Singlish ‘is still generally
seen as imperfectly learned Standard English,
both by scholars and the general public’. The
excerpt below provides an example of this kind
of Singlish:
On civic education
‘Eh don’t push push here, push push there,
I tell you simi tai ji,
your granfather never educate you, ah?
like that you must say eskew me!
– Singlish Poetry @Talking Cock.com
Spoken among the different ethnic groups in
Singapore, such Singlish is the informal lingua
franca. From the excerpt above, its features
include:
● the use of local particles: eh for ‘hey’ and ah
as a question tag
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● repetition of a word to show emphasis: push
push (‘push hard’)
● the use of elements from Chinese dialects, as
with the Hokkien phrase simi tai ji (‘What’s
your problem?’)
● the reduction of consonant sounds, as with
the d in grandfather (‘granfather’)
● lexical items adapted from the standard:
‘eskew’ for excuse
Singlish is also characterized by slang abbrevi-
ations (such as sabo for ‘sabotage’ and frus for
frustrated) and colloquialisms (such as shake
legs, from Malay goyang khaki, meaning ‘to be
completely at leisure’, and eat snake, from
Hokkien chiak chuah, meaning ‘shirk one’s
responsibilities’). According to Gupta (1994),
such usage emerged in the twentieth century
from a complex and often acrimonious contact
situation between colonizer and colonized and
among the different ethnic groups in the com-
munity. Singapore is a multicultural society,
but being multicultural can mean different
things to different people, with the ever-pre-
sent possibility of that ‘odd feeling of belong-
ing nowhere’, experienced by those who grow
up in a contact situation (Pride, 1982:58).
Another observation worth noting is that
contrary to the traditional notion that a
basilect is inferior and only used among less
educated people, Singlish is spoken at all levels
– from taxi drivers to civil servants to execu-
tives of large corporations. If Singlish was typ-
ically used among the less educated, we could
be led to believe that it was a desperate act to
make possible communication among the dif-
ferent ethnic groups. This could very well have
been the reason for its emergence in the first
place. However, if even highly educated and
fluent speakers of standard English are using it
for intra-communication, as is currently hap-
pening all over Singapore, it could mean a
number of things.
One could be the conscious effort extended
from one Singaporean to another, to show sol-
idarity, comradeship and intimacy (despite dif-
ferences in background). Another (and this
might sound ludicrous at first) is that Singlish
has evolved to demonstrate a people strug-
gling, often unconsciously, with feelings of
who they are or where they belong amidst the
two principal cultures vying for attention in
Singapore: East Asian and Western.
If we take into consideration Steinberg’s
(1993) assertion that language can reflect a
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change in the values and beliefs of its speakers,
can it then be said that Singlish, likewise, reflects
conflicting changes in the way Singaporeans
view themselves and their relationship with the
two cultures, both of which play important roles
in Singapore? Indirectly, the situation is remi-
niscent of that found among colloquial Hong
Kong English speakers (‘cultural eunuchs’, Lord
& T’sou, 1985:18), people ‘functioning in a ver-
bal and cultural vacuum’. According to Penny-
cook (1994), young ‘Honglish’ speakers have
found themselves caught between Eastern and
Western cultures because their English is not
good enough, but neither is their Chinese. Thus,
they claim to have no culture.
It is my opinion that, as the situation cur-
rently stands, Singlish reflects a certain uncer-
tainty among young Singaporeans about their
cultural identity, who they are and what their
place is in the world, both as a nation and a
people. Moreover, this identity flux may be
traced to two significant factors, one further
back than the other, but both with ripple
effects keenly felt today. One is the colonial
experience (early 1800s to middle 1900s) and
the tumultuous legacy it left behind; the other
is the state’s language policy in the late 1970s:
language standardization at the expense of the
vernacular tongues spoken especially by the
large majority of Chinese ethnic groups in
Singapore.
The Singlish speaker’s rejection of
the West
The influence of English in Singapore can be
traced back to the period of British rule in
Malaya from the 1820s. English was seen as
the window to elite status under the colonial
government. Those who spoke standard British
English (the Queen’s English) were perceived
to be more British than others. Before indepen-
dence in 1957, English was the symbol of colo-
nialism; after independence, there was a desire
among the different states in Malaya (of which
Singapore was one) for a language to replace
the language of the ex-colonizer. As Crystal has
put it (2003:145):
When a country becomes independent, there is
a natural reaction to leave behind the linguistic
character imposed by its colonial past, and to
look for indigenous languages to provide a
symbol of new nationhood.
He has however failed to write about the feel-
ings of hostility and belligerence evident
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among the colonized against the colonizer, just
as he avoided discussing the negative impact
English had on Africa during the colonial
period (Phillipson, 2000). In any case, there is
a deliberate attempt to leave behind the colo-
nial past due to feelings of ambivalence on the
part of the colonized towards everything that
reminded them of their former colonizers,
including their language. People did not want
to be reminded of their days of submission,
and getting rid of the language was one way of
obliterating the colonial past. This is evident in
Hiebert’s (1996:44) article War of words where
he quoted a well-known Singaporean enter-
tainment director as saying:
I’m not British, so why should I speak the
Queen’s English? We’re no longer a colony, but
a country of our own. I don’t want my children
to think we’re still a colony.
This view may be shared by a large number of
Singaporeans today. However, it was not pos-
sible to reject the English language totally,
when measured against the economic benefits
it offered. English was crucial if Singapore
wished to be a participating nation in world
trade and advanced technology. The govern-
ment recognized this, as did the people. At the
same time, there was no single indigenous lan-
guage to claim as a symbol of new nationhood,
given that Singapore was essentially an immi-
grant society where different ethnic groups
from all walks of life came to work and live
together. At the people’s level, the need to
communicate with one another and be under-
stood resulted in a contact pidgin that consists
mainly of English spiced with local dialects:
the beginnings of Singlish, a variety that
emerged for the sole purpose of intra-commu-
nication.
The government, on the other hand, showed
support for the language of the colonizer
largely because of the economic advantages
gained from having close ties with the West.
Attachments to standard British English were
central to the government’s language policy,
and a covert effort was made to encourage Sin-
gaporeans to use the language of its former
colonial rulers (Wilson, 1978; Lim, 1986;
Gook, 1981).
The government’s support for the language
of its colonizer by adopting English as a work-
ing and official language fuelled feelings of
uncertainty, inferiority and anti-colonialism
among the majority of Singaporeans, in all
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groups and classes. At the same time, despite
government disapproval, colloquial Singlish
continued to flourish at the popular level. In an
obscure sense, it could be seen as a reflection of
Singaporeans’ rebellion against first, the lan-
guage of the former colonizer, and second, the
government’s support for the colonizer’s lan-
guage. Thus, Singlish could be seen as a ‘strat-
egy of linguistic appropriation’ (Canagarajah,
2000), where some sign system of English,
such as syntax, has been appropriated to
include the native languages of the colonized,
so that a new hybrid code emerges. Canagara-
jah argues that the appropriation strategy is
one way in which the colonized community
attempts to rid itself of the ‘hegemonic ideolo-
gies of English’ (p.131), not through the out-
right rejection of the language but by bending
aspects of its system into a new ideological
shape. What this means is that, while there is
an urgent economic need to retain the lan-
guage, there is also resistance to importing it
wholesale. The emergence of a hybrid, whether
conscious or otherwise, could be a testament to
a colonized people’s rebellion against every-
thing their colonizers represented, including
their language.
It would also appear that, among other
things, such appropriation seeks to destabilize
the integrity of the language. Indeed, Singlish
has been referred to in a derogatory manner,
both by native speakers of English and its own
people. In Hiebert (1996:44), it is called a ‘bas-
tardization of the English language that is
unintelligible to the rest of the English speak-
ing world’. In McGurn (1996:40), it was the
‘mother tongue’s bastard offspring’. Indeed,
strong terms such as bastard and bastardiza-
tion suggest that Singlish is not only a defective
off-shoot of, but also a provocative insinuation
against, ‘proper’ English.
More importantly, as I see it, the negative
connotations associated with Singlish suggest
a people searching for a language and there-
fore an identity that is both legitimate and one
they can be proud of. Moreover, it seems that
the search is getting ever more desperate with
the deterioration of the cultural identities of
the ethnic groups in Singapore. Thus, Singa-
poreans find themselves not only reluctant to
identify with the West (despite English being
the city state’s official and working language)
but also already far removed from their East
Asian roots.
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The Singlish speaker’s ignorance of
the East
In a 1957 census, there were thirty-three
mother tongue groups in Singapore, twenty of
which were spoken by more than a thousand
people (cf. Kuo, 1976). Hokkien was the
dialect spoken by the majority of the Chinese,
Malay was uniform among the Malays, and
Tamil was the most widely spoken Indian lan-
guage. There was great diversity among the
different races in Singapore, each having a
number of smaller language groups. From the
beginning, Singapore has been home to many
ethnic/linguistic groups. In fact, prior to inde-
pendence, and even immediately afterwards,
the language of wider inter-communication
among Chinese, Malays, Indians, and
Eurasians was Bazaar Malay or Baba Malay
(Tay, 1978; Gupta, 1994).
Apart from this common lingua franca, the
racial groups did not have much in common in
terms of heritage and culture. Singapore began
as a society of migrants, a hotchpotch of people
from different walks of life with the main aim
of making a living rather than a home there.
Thus, from the start, Singaporeans did not
share common beliefs or customs and tradi-
tions. This cultural vulnerability becomes clear
when we consider Peterson’s (2001:51) claim
that ‘Singaporeans have no natural cohesive-
ness that comes from shared traditions’. He
further argues that this absence of a group cul-
tural identity is the main obstacle faced by the
government in trying to instil a Singaporean
national identity. The individual cultural iden-
tity of each ethnic group was passed down
largely through stories told by the elders to
youngsters in their vernacular tongues, a prac-
tice that has dwindled and died with the loss of
the vernaculars.
This may be due to two domestic linguistic
interventions. One was in 1967 when a well-
known local political figure gave a speech at a
concert he attended. There he urged Singa-
poreans to rid themselves of both the crazy,
pleasure-seeking, materialistic life style of the
West and the ‘feudalistic, superstitious, igno-
rant and pessimistic forces of the East’ (Birch,
1985:32). The implication was a new Singa-
pore culture and rejection of both Western and
Eastern cultures. But if we take into considera-
tion language and culture from the viewpoint of
‘linguistic relativism’ (Steinberg, 1993:163), we
might say that both are intimately interwoven
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in terms of how a people’s language can serve
not only to define their experiences but also
shape their view of the world.
Seen from this perspective, the appeal to
reject both the Western and Eastern cultures is
tantamount to asking for a rejection of linguis-
tic identities as well. This initial authoritative
rhetoric may have had an impact on the use of
Singlish as more than just a social marker, but
as a cultural disclaimer as well: part of a
Singaporean’s conflicting struggle with who he
or she is. Perhaps Philip’s (2002:99) analysis of
Haresh Sharmah’s play Rosnah best describes
the Singaporean’s identity crisis. In the play, a
Singaporean Malay woman Rosnah, a Singlish
speaker, struggles to find her cultural identity.
Not western in terms of skin colour and accent,
nor Eastern in terms of thinking, she declares:
‘I don’t want West. I don’t want East,’ which
does nothing to solve her problem at all. What
makes the play a genuine reflection of the
Singaporean’s cultural incompleteness is that it
is based on the real-life experiences of a cross-
section of Singapore’s three main races, all of
whom share common feelings of foreignness
and displacement as Singlish-speaking
Singaporeans.
Mandarin
The other influencing intervention that, in my
view, further aggravated this cultural and lin-
guistic crisis has been the pro-Mandarin cam-
paign that began in 1979, in which the Chinese
population was strongly encouraged to ‘use
Mandarin, not dialects’. The term dialects here
refers to the vernaculars spoken among the dif-
ferent Chinese ethnic groups such as
Hokkien(ese), Cantonese, and Hainanese. On
one level, it was aimed at the Chinese working
classes: the Speak Mandarin campaign was an
official attempt to standardize Mandarin as the
‘mother tongue’ for Chinese people in Singa-
pore. On another level, it sought to ‘redress’
Western influences which were seen to have an
undesirable impact on the lives of those edu-
cated through English (cf. Pennycook, 1994)
because along with Mandarin came the aggres-
sive promotion of a Chinese cultural identity
based on Confucian values.
One consequence of this largely successful
campaign was the creation of a keenly felt
East-West divide among Chinese Singapore-
ans. The other consequence was the gradual
death of the variety of Chinese dialects. With
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the Chinese forming some three quarters of the
total population at the time, the loss of these
dialects inevitably meant the demise of a large
portion of the diverse Chinese ethnic culture
and identity. Taking into consideration Siebel’s
(2001:33) viewpoint that language and cul-
ture evolve together, we can say that the death
of one will lead to the death of the other.
Indeed, the intricate intertwining between lan-
guage and culture is succinctly expressed in
Hassan (2005) when he writes (p. 9):
Within language is the collective memory of a
people: once the language is lost, so is the
memory, which contains the values, ethics, and
culture of that people. Once a new generation
loses the language of its parents, it loses the
whole collective memory.
In an attempt to reverse the loss, Gupta (2005)
has called for the learning of a third language,
either Malay or Mandarin in addition to Eng-
lish and the child’s first language, the aim
being to empower the many ethnic minority
children in academic terms, and promote
cross-cultural understanding. Although her
suggestion is commendable, it is my view that
standard Malay or Mandarin provides for only
a general understanding of a culture. Particu-
lar cultural practices, ideals and values come
from the vernacular Malay and Chinese spoken
in the home for generations. In other words,
the specific cultural values and beliefs come
from the traditions passed down orally from
great-grandparents to grandparents to parents
and children.
To cite a personal example: My experience in
Hong Kong was in many ways a cultural eye
opener. While both Hong Kong Chinese and
mainlander Chinese see themselves as Chi-
nese, they may not share a similar cultural
identity. Mandarin may exist as a common lin-
guistic denominator, but for the Hong Kong
Chinese their Cantonese culture and way of life
is vastly different from that of most of the
mainland. And while I and my Hong Kong col-
leagues may be Chinese physically, I can attest
to the difference between my Singaporean Chi-
nese view of the world and a Hong Kong Chi-
nese view.
There are some who argue that the cultures
of Singapore’s Chinese ethnic groups are still
very much alive and active. After all, ethnic
practices such as the observance of the month
of the hungry ghosts, the Tua Pek Kong birth-
day, the mooncake festival, and so on, are still
largely practised in modern-day Singapore. It
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is doubtful, however, if such observances hold
any cultural meaning for young Chinese Singa-
poreans who, because of their lack of know-
ledge of the vernacular tongues, were never
told about the traditions, values and beliefs
behind such practices by their Hokkien- or
Teochew- or Hakka-speaking grandparents.
Thus, while maintaining an appearance of
being accorded its rightful significance in soci-
ety, cultural sentiment has actually been
pushed out of frontline local politics (Chua,
1990). For me, my almost non-existing knowl-
edge of my dialectal tongue has hindered my
ability to fully understand the traditional cul-
tural values and beliefs of my ethnic group.
There have been many occasions when I just
could not string together a decent utterance in
my home dialect, Hainanese. Subconciously,
Singlish hides my inadequacy in my own
tongue while at the same time it acts as a sym-
bol of rebellion against using English whole-
sale.
While I may not agree with Philip’s (2002)
argument that culturally Singapore has not
found an identity, I believe that Singlish speak-
ers are experiencing ‘identity flux’. They do not
wish to associate themselves with the culture
of their colonial rulers, but at the same time
they are not able to identify themselves with
the traditions and values of their motherlands.
This is not surprising given that, in addition to
having almost no knowledge of their dialectal
tongues, many young Singaporeans have never
set foot in their motherlands. These are far-
away places they know little about. Thus, the
Singaporean cultural identity could be seen as
a tentative and uneasy mish-mash of East and
West, although it tends to lean more towards
the West.
This state of cultural limbo is evident in the
use of Singlish where you have a methodical
yet random mix of English and local languages.
In terms of the weaker version of the Whorfian
Hypothesis, I would say that Singlish reflects in
its speakers a conflicting view of themselves
and the two world cultures within which they
live and work. In short, it highlights an identity
that’s neither here nor there – an identity in
flux, similar to that old feeling of not belonging
expressed by Pride (1982) earlier in this paper.
Matisoff (1991), however, believes that the
loss of linguistic diversity may not be as gloomy
as we are inclined to think. To him, dying lan-
guages are always being replaced by new ones
and thus, in a sense, old cultures can over time
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be replaced by new. The world will never come
to a ‘zero language’ stage, so to speak. And if
this were so, if the ‘forces of renewal [language]
are in the long run just as powerful as the forces
of decline’ (pp.221–2), then it may be possible
for Singlish to reflect or shape a new culture for
its speakers in a century or two. As matters cur-
rently stand, one cannot but feel that the death
of the vernacular languages of mainly the Chi-
nese ethnic groups in Singapore, and the loss of
transmission of traditional lifestyles that such
languages carry with them, has meant a loss of
‘genuine diversity’ in Mühlhaüsler’s sense
(1996:270). As he sees that matter, such diver-
sity is that ‘which reflects thousands of years of
human accommodation to complex environ-
mental conditions’.
With Singlish then, are we replacing this
‘genuine diversity’ with ‘temporary shallow
variation’ (pp. 271): a variety described as
here today and gone tomorrow? In terms of
language, the former would refer to a language
which embodies a vast and rich repertoire of
centuries-old traditions and is shaped by far-
sighted experience, while the latter could be
simply a variation that is ad hoc and transient.
Conclusion
In her interviews with Singaporeans, Philip
(2002) claims that Singaporeans as a whole
feel that their cultures have been sidelined into
some inferior and obscure place. Given the
attention to Singlish in the research literature,
it must be pointed out that a sustained explo-
ration of this particular variety from a cultural
viewpoint has not been adequately addressed.
This paper, in bringing to light this cultural
void, may prompt some re-thinking on notions
of language and identity.
While Singlish may represent the encapsula-
tion of a people’s social identity, little is known
about how it reflects the way its speakers actu-
ally view themselves and their place in the two
world cultures that exert an influence on their
daily lives. If I may go back to the play men-
tioned above, I would say that, like Rosnah, for
me the use of Singlish, hides an identity des-
perate to be found. My viewpoints may not be
representative of all Singlish speakers, but I
believe that they are not without significance
either. The subtle underlying message in spo-
ken Singlish may well be: ‘I’m not west. I’m not
east. So how, leh?’
23
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