Speak Good Singlish
On August 22, 1999, the Prime Minister of Singapore, Goh Chok Tong, made a phone call to stop a force he believed could stifle Singapore’s economic development. He did not call the World Bank or the UN, but the Television Corporation of Singapore (TCS). The reason for this call? Everyone’s favorite actor, Phua Chu Kang, who starred on one of Singapore’s most popular TV shows, spoke Singlish. So, the Prime Minister asked him to enroll in classes to “improve his English.” The Prime Minister considered Kang’s English so important to his country’s future that he interfered in a sitcom.
This example shows the complex role that language plays in Singapore — government officials often see Singlish as a problem, as a version of English that needs to be fixed. One year after suggesting English classes to Phua Chu Kang, Prime Minister Tong launched the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM), which exists to this day. In this article, I will explore how knowing Singlish and knowing Standard English are not mutually exclusive and I will dispel the myth propagated by the SGEM that Singapore Colloquial English (CSE), also known as Singlish, is broken English.
First, let’s consider what the SGEM seeks to accomplish. In his speech announcing this movement, PM Tong emphasized the importance of speaking English to maintain appearances to countries outside of Singapore:
“If we speak a corrupted form of English that is not understood by others, we will lose a key competitive advantage. Poor English reflects badly on us and makes us seem less intelligent or competent. Investors will hesitate to come over if their managers or supervisors can only guess what our workers are saying” — Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong at the Launch of the Speech Good English movement in 2000.
Here, PM Tong posits a subtractive approach to language education — he believes that Singaporeans should replace their home variety of English (CSE) with the standardized national language (Standard English). Indeed, the SGEM’s current website also uses a subtractive view of CSE by positing a paradoxical mission statement. They claim to recognize the “existence of Singlish as a cultural marker for many Singaporeans,” yet they also state that they “aim to help those who speak only Singlish, and those who think Singlish is English, to speak standard English.” This statement stigmatizes Singlish. An additive approach to language, which promotes the development of standardized language skills while encouraging people to maintain Singlish, would accomplish the same goal of Singaporeans knowing English to communicate with the outside world without regarding CSE grammar as broken English (Flores).
Not Singaporean Blunders, but rather Colloquial Singapore English Grammar Rules
The SGEM website offers a plethora of resources for people hoping to replace their CSE with Standard English. In this part of the article, we will see how the SGEM treats many of the systematic grammar rules you may follow in your day-to-day speaking of CSE as mistakes rather than variations of English.
CSE Grammar: Count and Mass Nouns
In standard English, nouns can be divided into two categories: count and mass nouns. Nouns that you can count, like dogs, are count nouns. Nouns that cannot be counted by themselves because they are treated as a group, mass, or quantity are mass nouns.
Most nouns are divided like this in Standard English, but in CSE, count and mass nouns are not categorized in the same way. As you know, CSE relies on context to resolve any ambiguity: if the number of items you’re discussing is clear, then you don’t need to provide a quantifier or a count. Indeed, there are instances in which the plural inflection is absent in CSE and present in standard English. Consider the following example:
CSE: “Buy ticket for us.”
Standard English: “Buy tickets for us.”
Here, it is clear that the speaker meant multiple tickets, because they are talking about buying tickets for “us”, which must be at least two people. Therefore, the CSE speaker didn’t have to pluralize the word “ticket.” Standard English doesn’t depend on context in the same way, so the Standard English sentence does require ticket to be in its plural form.
This reliance on context also occurs in two of Singapore’s mother tongues: Mandarin and Malay. For example, let’s examine the following Malay sentence:
“Dia mempunyai kucing.”
This statement can mean he/she owns a cat/cats, so the speaker determines the number of cats based on context (Alsagoff).
SGEM’s View on Singlish Count and Mass Nouns
The SGEM website features a list of “Grammar Gaffes”, which they claim are “embarrassing mistakes” someone makes in public. The website claims that their list of corrections to common errors “may save you from unintended awkward moments”.
On this list of Gaffes, one perfectly parallels the example of context for count and mass nouns we considered above:
Gaffe: “The place I’ve been to are all in Asia”
Correct: “The places I’ve been to are all in Asia”
Here, it is clear that the speaker meant the plural version of the word “place” because they use the plural form of to be (“are”) and quantify it using “all”. This is an example of an instance where the listener could determine the number of “place” using context.
Another section of the SGEM website has a list of common “Singaporean Blunders.” One example from this list features another component of count and mass nouns in Singlish. Specifically, this example shows how Singlish doesn’t distinguish count nouns from mass nouns in its use of quantifiers.
Singaporean Blunder: “Please give me a few salt.”
Standard English: “Please give me less salt.”
Here, the website argues that it is a mistake for Singaporeans like you to use count descriptions like “few” for the noun salt and that only mass descriptions like “less” should be used. However, as discussed earlier, CSE does not make the same distinction between count and mass nouns like Standard English does. Therefore, when you say sentences like this so-called “blunder”, you’re not making a mistake so much as following an important set of linguistic rules.
CSE Grammar: The Perfective Aspect
Next, we’ll explore another component of CSE’s grammar: how CSE expresses the perfective aspect. What is the perfective aspect? It’s a way of presenting an action as a complete event that occurred in the past. For example, consider the task of expressing the idea that a baby has just started to learn to speak. Let’s see how CSE and Standard English would express this idea:
CSE: My baby speak already.
Standard English: My baby has started to speak.
In the CSE sentence, the “already” shows that this occurrence happened in the recent past and that the baby has just learned to talk (Alsagoff). In the Standard English sentence, the “has started” expresses this idea. In Standard English, there’s nothing that directly parallels this use of “already”, but we can see a clear parallel in Chinese. The word “le” from Mandarin, “liau” in Hokkien, and “leh” in Cantonese can mark the perfective aspect when used before an object, similar to the use of already in Singlish. This phenomenon constitutes another example of how the mother tongue languages of Singapore influence Singlish grammar.
SGEM’s View on Singlish Perfective Aspect
The SGEM’s list of “Singaporean Blunders” (discussed earlier) regards the use of already to mark the perfective aspect as a mistake rather than following a grammar rule. The example they provide considers the task of expressing if someone has eaten already:
Singaporean Blunder: “You got eat already?”
Standard English: “Have you eaten?”
In the CSE sentence, we don’t see “eat” conjugated to form “eaten.” Instead, we see “eat already” representing “eaten”. The sentence uses “already” exactly as it should be used according to Singlish grammar. However, similar to the above discussion of count and mass nouns, classifying this sentence as a “Singaporean Blunder” is another example of the SGEM characterizing Singlish grammar as broken English despite its legitimacy.
Concluding Thoughts
The premise of the SGEM’s arguments about these grammar blunders is that people are making a mistake when they say them, but often, the so-called blunders they discuss follow the systematic linguistic structure of CSE. Therefore, you should not regard these as mistakes to be removed entirely from your approach to language, but rather recognize that they are legitimate forms of CSE. Following the additive approach to language, these forms can exist in tandem with how Standard English might express similar ideas.
We have seen how the Speak Good English Movement falsely portrays Singlish as lacking a systematic and coherent grammar by regarding it as a set of mistakes. Yet, in actuality, Singlish’s carefully constructed grammar rules reflect the linguistic diversity of Singapore’s mother tongues. We’ve also explored the additive approach to language, which unlike the SGEM, recognizes that while one can know CSE, one can also know Standard English without stigmatizing CSE. So let’s approach Singlish with the respect that its systematic linguistic structure deserves.
References
“Speak Good English Movement.” Speak Good English Movement, Speak Good English Movement (Government of Singapore), https://www.languagecouncils.sg/goodenglish. Accessed on 5 June 2021.
Speech By Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong At The Marine Parade National Day Dinner 1999, Sun 29 August 1999, 8.00 PM.
Nelson Flores, Jonathan Rosa; Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review 1 December 2015; 85 (2): 149–171. doi: https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149
Alsagoff, Bao Z., Pakir, A., Talib, I. &Wee, L. The Grammar of Singapore English In Society, Style and Sturcture in Language (1998). Singapore: Prentice Hall.