Repositioning Singlish in Singapore’s language-in-education policies

ABSTRACT

Singapore’s language-in-education policies have always prescribed that only a standard variety of English be allowed in teaching and learning. This view of upholding a standard has been pervasive not only in education but also throughout Singapore’s society. In this article, we review Singapore’s language policy, emphasizing the functional polarization of languages ideology that serves as its basis, and discuss the resultant natural emergence of the key linguistic marker of Singaporean national identity – Singlish. Charting the journey and growth of Singlish’s role and status from both official and socio-cultural perspectives, we highlight that changes can be observed. It is, thus, imperative that Singlish’s place in language classrooms and the affordances that Singlish has for language learning be reconsidered. Following a discussion of salient Singlish features, highlighting their appropriacy in social situations where standard English features are not and the fact that many Singapore English features are recognizably shared by both Singlish and Singapore Standard English, we propose a linguistic feature-based contrastive analysis approach for Singapore’s English language classrooms. At the core, we call for a review of Singapore’s language-in-education policies and the support of various stakeholders in the bid to nurture confident and effective English language users of the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Language policy
• Singlish
• Singapore English
• language education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use Singapore Standard English (SSE) to refer to a more recognizably standard variety of English used by Singaporeans. We do not deny the innate complexity of the term “standard” but also note that, in this article, we use SSE to refer to a general variety of Singapore English that is used in more formal contexts and/or with non-Singaporean speakers of English. This variety does not vary too substantially from other standard varieties of English. We also use Singapore English (SgE) to include all varieties of English used by Singaporean English speakers.

2. On 10 March 1965, just a few months before Singapore gained independence, the MacDonald House building in Singapore was bombed by two Indonesian commandos as part of Indonesia’s Konfrontasi campaign to disrupt the merging of Malaya, Singapore, Sabah, and Sarawak. Although Sukarno’s ouster in a September 1965 coup brought an end to Konfrontasi, the MacDonald House bombing, which killed three civilians and injured 33, impacted Singapore-Indonesia relations for years to come (Chua, 2015).

3. Unlike the usual sense of the term, mother tongue, in Singapore, does not refer to the chronological first language one learns from infancy. It instead refers to the language one is assigned to study as a second language in school – generally based on paternal ethnicity. As Gupta (1998) informs us, it is important to understand that everyone in Singapore has an official “race”…which may not reflect actual language knowledge and use” (p. 117).

4. Relations between different ethnic groups in Singapore do indeed seem harmonious when contrasted with the ethnic tensions that still curse so many other societies. But a 2013 study conducted by OnePeople.sg and the Institute of Policy Studies found that over a third of Singaporeans had no close friends from a different ethnicity (Sim, 2015), so there is still a ways to go before Singapore, as a society, moves beyond mere tolerance and peaceful co-existence.

5. Use of Singlish in direct speech has also long been perceived to be a way to get higher marks on O-level examinations as this supposedly appeals to the Cambridge markers.

6. While they do not discuss it in any detail, Tan and Tan (2008) also do suggest a contrastive analysis approach, arguing that Singlish “could be discussed and contrasted with the standard, somewhat like the British National Curriculum” (p. 477).