October 23, 2018

How did Singlish become what it is today?

International Creole Day is a global festival that commemorates the variety of creole languages in the world today. It falls on 28 October and was first marked in 1983 by an association of creole linguists called the Bannzil Kreyol. A creole is a type of language derived from a pidgin – a combination of two languages with simplified grammar – which has evolved into a stable indigenised language with its own vocabulary and grammatical structure.

In the midst of debates surrounding the status of Singlish, Professor Bao Zhiming (Department of English Language and Literature), in The Making of Vernacular Singapore English (Cambridge University Press, 2015), examines whether Singlish is a pidgin, a creole, or something else. Through a contact linguistics approach, the study of the interaction between two or more languages, he analyses the impact of Chinese and Malay which subsequently paved the way for the development of the Singlish we speak today. Bao highlights Chinese as being the more influential source given the high influx of Chinese migrants who settled in Singapore since the 19th century. He also cites state initiatives such as the bilingual education system and the annual language campaigns for the proliferation of Standard English and specifically Mandarin, thereby accounting for their dominant influence on the language.

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