Illustration by Chng Choon Hiong (source: The Straits Times)

One of the most quintessential Singaporean experiences would be having your speech corrected from a young age – by peers, parents, or educators alike – and being told not to speak Singlish for a variety of reasons. The most pervasive of those reasons would have to be “Singlish is bad English, and interferes with proper English education”. The importance of learning standard English is undeniable, but does knowing Singlish really compromise the learning of standard English?

In order to properly explore this topic, we should first understand what exactly Singlish is. Singapore Colloquial English (SCE), more commonly known as Singlish, is one of the many varieties of English that exist around the world, and is characterised by its grammar and pragmatic particles, such as “lah” and “lor”. On the other hand, Standard Singapore English (SSE) is the more widely accepted variety, seen as being more closely aligned with Standard British English. This divide is not new to language; in 1965, linguist William Stewart proposed a “creole continuum” to help classify these distinct varieties. The two ends of the continuum feature the acrolect, or the most prestigious variety, and the basilect, or the least prestigious variety. In the case of Singapore, SSE would be classified as an acrolect, and SCE a basilect.

This classification is crucial because SCE is not simply “broken” English – it is its own variety with its own grammatical rules and linguistic features. To give an example, the SCE sentence “You coming today, is it?” is not a “broken” derivative of the SSE sentence “Are you coming today?” – in fact, it features two of SCE’s most distinct grammatical features: zero copula (the omission of “are”), and the generalised “is it?” question tag. Another similar example would be “My handwriting not good, is it?”, with the omission of “is” and the addition of the “is it?” question tag. Simply put, there is a method to the madness; Singlish is non-standard in very specific ways, and that classifies it as a variety rather than “broken” and unintelligible English.

Now that we have established SSE and SCE as related but distinct varieties, we can look at existing research on language acquisition, and whether simultaneous acquisition of two or more languages or language varieties will compromise the quality of either. In “Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children” by Jürgen M. Meisel (1989), Meisel explores the process of language acquisition in bilingual children, the phenomena of code-switching (which will be explained later) in bilingual children, and reports on whether or not his subjects (two French-German bilingual children studied over the period of two years) are able to differentiate between these two languages, and use them correctly whenever they desired.

Meisel adopts the three-stage model proposed by Volterra and Taeschner (1978):

1. The child has only one vocabulary comprising words from both languages
2. Two distinct vocabularies develop, but the child still uses the same sentence-construction rules for both languages
3. Two distinct sentence-construction systems develop, resulting in the complete differentiation of two linguistic systems for each language

In this paper, he focuses on investigating stage (2) – whether or not this language mixing causes differentiation and proper usage of each language to become more difficult for the child, and whether or not this period of confusion even exists. Upon comparing the appearance of linguistic features (such as verbs, verb inflection, and suffixes) in their speech, he found that bilingual children “acquire each of the two languages very much like monolingual children” (1989:339) , with almost no errors, and all of which can be attributed to performance errors or omissions that are common in casual and adult speech.

Meisel also makes a very important distinction between language mixing and code-switching, the former being a result of the child “not being able to differentiate the two languages” (1989:322), and the latter being the child’s ability to “select the language according to the interlocutor, the situational context, etc.” (1989:322). Language mixing manifests in the fusion of two different grammatical systems, while code-switching shows in the use of two different vocabularies interchangeably “to express a word or an expression that is not immediately accessible in the other language” (Grosjean, 1982:206). Distinct language differentiation is therefore present in children who can code-switch, demonstrating that occasionally tapping into SCE vocabulary in an otherwise SSE sentence speaks positively rather than negatively about bilingual linguistic competence.

These observations are irrefutably mirrored in Singaporeans. When given proper instruction, even children are able to converse with their peers in SCE while passing oral, listening, and written examinations in SSE. We can easily navigate educational and professional settings with SSE, then order dinner at the hawker centre in SCE. The next time you hear your child slip into Singlish at home, perhaps consider congratulating instead of correcting them – after all, at a young age, they have just demonstrated mastery and contextual understanding in when and where to use two entirely different varieties of English.

This post was written by our intern Symantha and edited by our lab manager Fei Ting and research assistant Shaza.

BLIP Lab is currently recruiting families with children from ages 0-4 years for our upcoming Baby Talk-a-thon! Sign up here: https://ntuhss.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK

More information about our Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

References

Stewart, William (1965), “Urban Negro speech: Sociolinguistic factors affecting English teaching”, in R. Shuy; A. Davis; R. Hogan (eds.), Social dialects and language learning, National Council of Teachers of English, 10–18.

Meisel, J. M. (1989). Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. Bilingualism across the Lifespan, 13–40. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511611780.003 

Volterra, V., & Taeschner, T. (1978). The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. The bilingualism reader, 2.

Grosjean, François. (1982). Life with two languages: an introduction to bilingualism. Harvard University Press.