August 22, 2022

In his 1999 National Day Rally Speech, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong pointed out that good English should be spoken on national television, in support of Singapore’s Speak Good English Campaign which was slated to be launched the following year. Prime Minister Goh argued that English that was grammatically correct and understood by other native speakers helped Singaporeans compete on a global stage. He even made an example out of beloved sitcom character, Phua Chu Kang, for his use of Singlish on national television. He argued that the sitcom character’s larger-than-life persona and influence meant that impressionable viewers were more ready to adopt Singlish expressions.

In ‘The Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM)’ (World Englishes, 2021), Graduate Student Instructor Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales (University of Michigan Linguistics), Associate Professor Mie Hiramoto (NUS English Language and Literature), Adjunct Lecturer Jakob Leimgruber (University of Basel English), and doctoral candidate Mr Jun Jie Lim (University of California Linguistics) introduce the first version of the corpus of Singapore English messages (CoSEM). A corpus is a language resource that consists of a large and structured set of texts. In this case, the corpus contained online text messages from Singaporeans that were collected between 2016 and 2019.

Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) is a type of English that Singaporeans are familiar with. The CSE that we are familiar with today combines and uses words from Singapore’s heritage languages of Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay, and Tamil, reflecting Singapore’s multiethnic and diverse population. A corpus of Singapore English allows linguists to trace linguistic innovations within CSE and offers a rich resource for further linguistic investigations.

For example, the researchers found the use of the word bojio to be particularly interesting. Aside from the fact that Singaporeans often employ the word bojio in different senses when communicating without compromising the intended meaning of the sentence, tracing the history of the word bojio also reveals age groups that are more likely to use the word. An even more interesting finding is that younger speakers of CSE have come up with a new way to use the word jio, further demonstrating the dynamics of language innovation and development.

The researchers present the first version of a corpus of Singapore English and imagine new ways in which this corpus can be employed to study the linguistic innovations within CSE.

Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12534