“Uncle”?

My American friend repeated quizzically. I thought: how does one refer to a stranger outside of Singapore? “I meant an old man, some stranger,” I corrected myself.

I was relaying an anecdote to my friend, who is American and has no understanding of Singlish whatsoever, including the fact that the noun ‘uncle’ can refer to any man from an older generation who may or may not be a relative. It took me this moment to realise how idiosyncratic our unique blend of colloquial English is. I was spending my semester abroad in upstate New York, and found that my code-switching capabilities were unexpectedly running short.

How difficult can it be? I speak English too, and with Singapore being no stranger to the effects of American cultural imperialism, the majority of Singaporean youth have a grasp on how the Americans talk based on binging episodes of American television, consuming American products and listening to American musicians. 

Instead, I still found myself at times trying to explain what ‘sia’ or ‘leh’ meant, oftentimes failing to come up with an understandable definition and feeling embarrassed at simultaneously looking like a ‘failed’ Singaporean and feeling like I speak broken English. Growing up in the shadow of the ‘Speak Good English’ movement, I was inculcated with the knowledge that Singlish is detrimental to one’s social standing and hinders their upward mobility. And yet, Singlish has never been any less removed from the common Singaporean vernacular of today. In fact, those that consciously attempt to separate themselves from Singlish seem to only face ridicule and are accused of being supercilious.

What does this mean about our perception of language? More than just a tool for communication, it is a marker of our national identity and represents our shared history: there are vestiges of Standard British English mixed with lexical borrowings from our 4 official languages to produce a cocktail of a language that is singularly unique and non-standard. I found myself conflicted by the government’s attempts to eradicate a wonderful shared creation, and even though the Singaporean government has switched its stance in recent years by acknowledging Singlish’s unifying force and even celebrating it, the widely-held perception that ‘Singlish is bad’ remains, my aforementioned feelings of shame included.

I am still learning to accept the beauty of Singlish: my difficulty in defining a Singlish term is simply a testament to its profound complexity, and my inability to completely desert it in my vernacular only speaks to my own enduring bonds to my home country. Speaking to a fellow Singaporean friend who had also just returned from the States, we both lamented at how hard it was to communicate with a non-Singaporean for a prolonged period of time because only Singlish, in its diversity and emotional depth, is able to effectively bring across the truest sense of what we mean. How does one translate into words the despair associated with the term ‘sian’, the pleasure associated with ‘shiok’ and the simple joy of exclaiming ‘gao dim!’ at the end of a tedious and difficult task? As a celebrated linguist once said: “A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.”

This post was written by our intern, Charlotte. Charlotte is a 4th year student majoring in Public Policy and Global Affairs and speaks English and Mandarin.

What do you call the people around you? Do you call strangers ‘uncle’ and ‘auntie’? Do you use these same words for family members? We’re interested to find out more about these ‘kinship terms’ used in Singapore! Participate in our online study here: https://ntusingapore.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6WgBjxXcjSM3IvI

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!