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1ntroduction
2Singlish is an English-lexified contact variety spoken in Singapore, by most of its 6 million population (Harbeck, 2016), regardless of race (Chinese, Indians, Malay, Eurasians) or socioeconomic class. Singlish locates itself at the basilectal end of the continuum of English varieties spoken in Singapore. It is basilect to the acrolectal variety Standard Singapore English, which is also closest to the target Received Pronunciation (British variety). While the superstrate influence on Singlish is English, there are many loanwords entering the lexicon from substrate languages. Substrate influences are Bazaar Malay, Chinese Dialects (Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese etc), and Tamil. Notably, the influence of Tamil on Singlish has been weak compared to Bazaar Malay and Chinese Dialects, perhaps reflective of the historical and present minority status of Indians in Singapore. 
3The roots of Singlish can be traced back to the 1950s (Perrote, 2014), and to understand its development, it is necessary to do so via the lenses of social, historical, and political situations that led to its rise. 
4Colonial History, Education, and Bilingual Policy
5Malays were the indigenous population of Singapore. In 1819, Singapore was founded as a British trading post by Sir Stamford Raffles and became part of the British colony. This led to the subsequent arrivals of traders of different ethnicities, particularly that of Southern Chinese (Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka, Hainanese) and Indians. In the early colonial days, Bazaar Malay, a pidginised form of Malay with drastically reduced lexicon, highly simplified morphosyntax, and heavily influenced by Chinese structure, was the lingua franca for inter-ethnic communication (Platt & Lian, 1982). 
6The widespread use of English on a societal basis and the simultaneous development of Singlish was largely driven by educational policies instituted after the Japanese Occupation. Prior the Japanese Occupation in 1942, education was neither free nor compulsory.  Education, if any, was provided by private clans and associations organised around ethnicities. These schools were called vernacular schools, as the medium of instruction of the schools were ethnic languages associated with the ethnicity of the funding association. Thus, a Chinese student would attend a school funded by a Chinese association, with Chinese as the language of instruction. The same principle applied to students of other races. English-medium schools existed then as well— these were established by the government or missionaries, and typically, Asian (ethnic) languages were not taught alongside English. According to Platt (1975), it was at these schools that Standard Singapore English was created. Students at these English-medium schools were mostly children of the privileged echelon of society, where their parents perceived proficiency in English as an advantage for their children’s career (Platt, 1975). As such, prior 1942, English use on a societal basis was restricted to an elite minority, with the main speech varieties of society being Chinese dialects, Indian languages, and Malay, used intra-ethnically, and Bazaar Malay, used inter-ethnically. After the end of the Japanese Occupation in 1945, Singapore still inherited its past education system of vernacular schools. However, English education was slowly introduced and encouraged. In 1953, a white paper on bilingual education in Chinese medium schools was put forth by the colonial government. In order to qualify for government aid, schools were required to teach the English language and also have Mathematics and Science taught in English (Sim, 2016). This was subsequently implemented in 1954. A major turning point for widespread use and subsequent learning of English occured in 1959 when the People’s Action Party (PAP) was elected to power. The PAP chose English as Singapore’s working language, for both socio-political and economic reasons. Socio-politically, English was a racially “neutral” language given the equal lack of access by all ethnicities. As such, it was seen as a language that could unite an ethnically diverse Singapore, as it did not run the risk of elevating a particular racial group at the expense of another. Economically, English was perceived as advantageous by the government given its role as a world language, and thus could help Singapore participate in the international economy. The choice of English as Singapore’s working language necessarily shaped subsequent education policies. In 1966, the Bilingual Policy was introduced— the study of a second language was made compulsory in primary (i.e. elementary) and secondary (i.e. high school) schools. Students in vernacular schools had to study English as a second language, while students in English-medium schools were required to learn an additional language (Sim, 2016). In 1983, the Bilingual Policy was revised, and English was required to be the first language of all schools, with ethnic languages as the second language. It was against this backdrop of post-war bilingual education that Singlish arose. 
7 Sociological Survey of Singlish: Language Attitudes and The Speak Good English Movement
8Given the context in which Singlish developed, that is, in schools where students were originally intended to acquire Standard English, it is of no wonder that Singlish is a stigmatised variety. It is almost as if Singlish came about due to an inability to properly acquire Standard English. In addition to this, the creation of a localised English variety also contradicted the very aims of the government’s English education— to enable Singapore to become a global economic hub. As such, Singlish was hugely frowned upon by the Singapore government. In a national day celebration speech in 1999, then Senior Minister, late Mr Lee Kuan Yew gave a speech which heavily criticised the use of Singlish. An overtly negative attitude was pervasive in the entire speech, with explicitly strong statements made such as “Singlish being a handicap we must not wish on Singaporeans” (Ministry of Information and The Arts, 1999). Not long after, in 2000, the government kickstarted the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM), which is still presently ongoing, to clamp down on Singlish in order to improve English standards. Then Prime Minister, Mr Goh Chok Tong, in the movement’s launching speech, advised Singaporeans “not to take the attitude that Singlish is cool or feel that speaking Singlish makes them more “Singaporean”, stating that Singlish “sentences are not only ungrammatical and truncated but often incomprehensible” (Sim, 2015). The initiatives of the SGEM included retraining English language teachers by sending them to undergo courses on English grammar, as well as restricting the use of Singlish in the media. Four days after the launch of SGEM, an anonymous bottom up movement, the Speak Good Singlish Movement, was launched (Wee, 2014). It was a reaction to the SGEM, and celebrated the use of Singlish in Singapore. 
9In recent years however, it has been observed that the government has been taking a softening stance toward the use of Singlish. Today, the SGEM website no longer overtly aims for the eradication of Singlish, and even goes as far as to acknowledge that “Singlish is a cultural marker for many Singaporeans”. It limits its scope of purpose from not using Singlish at all, to “helping those who speak only Singlish, and those who think Singlish is English, to speak Standard English” ("About Us", n.d.).  Also, in 2015 at Singapore’s 50th national day celebration, a major event for Singapore, props containing Singlish words were used. This reflects the governments increasing recognition of Singlish as a marker of Singaporean identity. As such, while Singlish may not have overt prestige, it has significant covert prestige, which even the government has conceded to in recent years. Given its ability to serve as a marker of solidarity, even across ethnic groups, in an otherwise culturally diverse society, it is unlikely that the use of Singlish will go away anytime soon.
10In light of governmental attitudes toward Singlish, it follows naturally that the use of Singlish and Standard Singapore English is diglossic. While Singlish is used in informal community contexts, Standard Singapore English is used in formal and official contexts where usage of Singlish will be largely unacceptable. 
11Linguistic Survey of Singlish
12A Pidgin? A Creole? Or Neither?
13As earlier mentioned and evident from the context in which Singlish arose, Singlish is a contact variety. In this section, the type of contact variety Singlish is will be discussed. It is observed that in lay literature, Singlish has often been referred to as a “creole” or “pidgin”. However, this section will undertake the argument that it is more appropriate instead to label Singlish as an indigenised variety.
14According to Roberge (2009), a pidgin is a linguistic creation of a new contact community that has need for a common means of communication, but does not share a common language. While there hardly exists a consensus for the definition of a creole, most definition of creoles presuppose the existence of the aforementioned contact community. Both the classical and hedged classical view minimally assumes a pidgin ancestor, and while the social definition of a creole by Mufwene (2000) does not necessarily comment on the existence of a pidgin ancestor, it is also based on a contact community that does not share a common language given the utilisation of non-indigenous slave labour. On this basis, Singlish does not fit the profile of a pidgin or creole, as Singlish arose in a context of bilingual education where every language community had access to English. In addition, before access to English occured, there already existed Bazaar Malay as the lingua franca for inter-ethnic communication. As such, there was no need to create a new language for “a common means of communication”. 
15By this characterisation of widespread bilingual education of English, Singlish is more appropriately considered an indigenised variety. An indigenised variety is a language that arises out of linguistic indigenisation, which occurs when a language is transplanted in a new location and learnt and used by the local population (Siegel, 2013). This often occurs in the context of colonies, where the language of the coloniser is transplanted and learnt as a second language on a widespread basis in the colonised country. Both psycho- and sociolinguistic mechanisms are involved in linguistic indigenisation. Psycholinguistic processes at an individual level occur first and relate to second-language acquisition processes such as transfer and simplification (e.g. reduction, regularisation). Sociolinguistic processes at the group level occur subsequently, and facilitate stabilisation and conventionalisation of indigenised features to create new norms. Typically, environmental (frequency), linguistic (salience and semantic transparency), and social factors (marker of solidarity) converge to determine which features are retained on a group level (Siegel, 2013).
16Linguistic Features
17Due to linguistic indigenisation, Singlish has transformed to become markedly different from English. Indeed, the Singapore government was accurate to some extent in stating that Singlish is “often incomprehensible, especially to foreigners” (Sim, 2015). This is because Singlish is a variety of English, characterised by its own unique sound system, suprasegmental features, syntax, and vocabulary. In this section, an analysis of the linguistic features of Singlish will be undertaken.
18Phonetics
19The original target variety in Singapore was that of the British Received Pronunciation. As such, discussion of phonetic features will be done in relation to phonetic features of the British Received Pronunciation. 
20Vowels
21The Singlish sound system consists of only 8 vowels— they are: / i  e  ɛ  ə  ʌ  u  o  ɔ / . Vowels that were originally differentiated in the Received Pronunciation, collapsed to form a single vowel in Singlish via the process of merger. Examples of this are the lax vowels /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, where once distinct from the tense vowels  /i/ and /u/ respectively in the Received Pronunciation, they are now simply realised as [i] and [u] respectively in Singlish. As a result, words such as “sheep” and “ship” in Singlish sound identical due to vowel merger. It has also been proposed by Bao (1998) that the vowels /e/ and /o/ have merged with /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ respectively, which thus gives a sound system with just the 6 vowels: / i  ɛ  ə  ʌ  u  ɔ /. As one might expect with the presence of vowel mergers, monophthongisation is also observed in Singlish. This particularly occurs in the “FACE” and “GOAT” set (Leimgruber, 2011). What were originally diphthongal /eɪ / and /əʊ/ in the “FACE” and “GOAT” set respectively in Received Pronunciation, has become monophthongal /e/ and /o/ in Singlish. 
22Consonants
23The list of consonants in Singlish are almost identical to the consonants in Received Pronunciation.  However there are several distinctive features of consonants in Singlish. Inter-dental fricatives /θ̱/ and /ð̠/ are often realised as /t/ and /d/ respectively. In word final positions however, /θ̱/ is often realised as /f/ (Leimgruber, 2011), such that the word “health” is pronounced as / h ɛ l f / (example from Bao, 1998). Word-final consonants are also often unrealised. For instance, the word “can’t” is uttered as /k ʌ n/ without the word-final consonant /t/. At times, certain word final consonants are instead replaced with glottal stops. An example of this is the word “dark” realised as /dɑʔ/.
24Suprasegmental Features
25The suprasegmental features of Singlish make it a very unique English variety. It is a syllable-timed language (as opposed to most English varieties which are stress-timed) and somewhat tonal. Each syllable in Singlish is accorded approximately equal time, and stress is non-contrastive. As such, apart from context, it is not possible to distinguish between verbs (e.g. reCORD) and nouns (e.g. REcord) only from the use of stress. The use of tone in Singlish is particularly evident in discourse particles— particles that alter the pragmatics of the utterance— where different tones affect the meaning and usage of the discourse particles. This is unsurprising, given that the origins of discourse particles are Chinese dialects, which themselves are tonal languages.
26Grammar: Word Order
27Singlish is an SVO word order language. However, it is common for the object to be fronted such that the word order becomes OSV, for the purpose of making the topic more prominent. Topic-fronting is very common in Chinese languages, and this is probably an incidence of substratum transfer. Typical of contact languages, a question in Singlish can be posed without much variation from the sentence form of an utterance. A question can be posed from the sentence form of an utterance simply by using a rising tone, or by using the invariant tags “is it” or “isn’t it”. For example, one could make the statement “You take plain rice” into a question, by simply stating it in a rising tone, or by adding the invariant tag such that it becomes “You take plain rice is it?” (Platt & Weber, 1980). Passive constructions can also be formed by using the Malay grammatical word “kena”. Instead of “The shop owner was beaten by the robber” in Standard English, it will be “The shop owner kena beaten by the robber” in Singlish (Bao and Wee, 1999).
28Grammar: Tense, Mood, Aspect
29In terms of verbal-marking of tense, mood, and aspect, Singlish does not resemble Standard English. Verbs in Singlish are often uninflected, where neither past tense nor third person singular ‘-s’ is marked. This is likely due to substratum transfer from Malay and/ or Chinese which do not have morphologically marked tense and agreement features (Platt & Weber, 1980). In spite of the lack of verbal tense marking, locating the verb in time is often possible with the help of context or adverbial markings. Examples of adverbial markings are phrases such as “last time”, which situates the verb in the past, and “next time”, which situates the verb in the future (Alsagoff, 1998). For the marking of irrealis mood, Singlish often uses “would” in structures where “will” normally occurs in Standard English (Platt and Weber, 1980). According to Tongue (as cited in Alsagoff, 1998), this may be due to a perception by speakers that “would” is more polite than “will”. Aspect in Standard English is marked in two ways— the perfective aspect by combining “have” and the past participle form of the verb, and the progressive aspect by combining “be” and the present participle form of the verb. In Singlish, these two aspects are marked differently and there exists the presence of an additional third habitual aspect. Perfective aspect in Singlish is marked using the word “already”. For instance, a statement such as “I have eaten” in Standard English, will be expressed as “I eat already” in Singlish. This is likely an instance of a type of functional transfer, where functions of a grammatical morpheme from a substrate language are applied to a word in the superstrate language that does not have a grammatical function (Siegel, 2013). Platt and Weber (as cited in Siegel, 2013) traces the grammatical use of “already” to the Hokkien word “liau”, which is used to mark completion. While progressive aspect in Singlish is also marked by the present participle of the verb, it differs from Standard English in that the preceding “be” is not used, and the present participle of the verb is also supplemented by the use of the adverb “still” (Alsagoff, 1998). For instance, a statement “I am eating” in Standard English, will be expressed as “I still eating” in Singlish. In addition to the two aspects present in Standard English, Singlish also marks for a habitual aspect with “always”. For instance, someone who eats ice cream daily might express this in Singlish by saying “I always eat ice cream every day”. 
30Grammar: Predication
31Perhaps due to transference from Chinese substrate which does not utilise the copula, the copula in Singlish is frequently deleted, particularly in attributive or equative clauses (Alsagoff, 1998). Besides copula deletion, “got” also frequently replaces “be” as an existential-locative predicate (Alsagoff, 1998). 
32Discourse Particles
33One of the most unique features of Singlish, recognisable even to foreigners, is the use of clause-final discourse particles, such as the stereotypical “lah”. These discourse particles are context dependent, and alter the pragmatics of the utterance. Table 1 gives a list of discourse particles, and their corresponding meaning and usage (Leimgruber, 2011). The roots of discourse particles traces back to Southern Chinese dialects.
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35
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37Lexicon
38Words from substrate languages have entered the Singlish lexicon extensively, particularly, when it pertains to cultural (e.g. food) items. It will be almost impossible to engage in a conversation with a local food stall owner without having to use words originating from another substrate language. For instance, to order a cup of black coffee, the buyer will ask for “kopi-o”, where “kopi” comes from Malay to mean coffee, and “o” comes from Hokkien to mean black. 
39Singlish In Relation to Other Contact Languages
40From the above linguistic analysis, it is interesting to note that Singlish shares many linguistic features of creoles, as identified by Velupillai (2015). Like most creoles, Singlish has a reduced phonemic space relative to its target Received Pronunciation. Its word order is also extremely prototypical of creoles, with basic SVO word order, which also remains unchanged in polar questions with the exception of being uttered in an interrogative tone. In addition, it shares similarities with creoles with regard to verb phrases, as there exists mood and aspect markers, although tense markers are generally variable or non-existent. Finally, similar to creoles, the copula is frequently deleted, especially for adjectival predicates.
41This striking similarity between Singlish and creoles did not go unnoticed by scholars. Platt (1975) was so intrigued that he created a new terminology, “creoloid”, to capture the observation that Singlish shared many features with creoles even though it did not share the same developmental origins with them. Perhaps this similarity might in part explain the common lay perception of Singlish as a creole.
42Nonetheless, in spite of this similarity, Singlish is unique from creoles especially with regard to its suprasegmental features and discourse particles. This is likely due to substantial substratum transfer, characteristic of the underlying mechanism of linguistic indigenisation. It is observed that in Platt’s later publications, the term “creoloid” to categorise Singlish was replaced with “indigenised variety”. 
43Conclusion
44Singlish is a fascinating language that draws its influence from numerous Asian languages in addition to English. These languages came into especially intense contact during widespread English bilingual education during the post war era, thus facilitating the psycho- and sociolinguistic processes that drove linguistic indigenisation. As a result of these processes, Singlish possesses unique phonological, suprasegmental, grammatical, and semantic features that make it markedly distinct from English. While once a highly stigmatised variety in Singapore and even with policies targetted at it, Singlish today is gaining traction among Singaporeans, and in fact, thriving as a language that marks the Singaporean identity. 
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