Dear all
I've just been wondering about what was mentioned in class yesterday. Brad made a comment about Singlish being a mixture of chinese and all its dialect into english while malinglish had malay mixed into english.
Have anyone heard of Tamil or other India's language mixed into english?
My primary and secondary school english teacher were both Indian so perhaps that gave me an impression that Indian generally speak less Singlish and more English.
I must apologise for the sweeping statement, but personally that's how i feel.
I know people are easily offended by sweeping statements but that is definitely not my intent here. Feel free to comment.
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Honestly, I don't think Singlish is just from dialects of Chinese. It has contributions from Malay as well. Think of the Mediacorp show on channel 8 on weekdays 7pm. A few of the characters like to speak mix the word Tak Boleh Tahan(cannot stand it) into their mandarin speech. Also, words like sotong which are often used in Singapore are actually Malay words as well. So I think they should be examples of Malay, Tamil and other languages inside Singlish itself.
ReplyDeleteHey,
ReplyDeleteYes there is such a thing as Tamil mixed with English, often at the despair of Tamil teachers. A common example would be having a Tamil and ending it off with "-ing" instead of the appropriate Tamil word in continuous tense.
And obviously your English teacher would rather speak good English than Singlish. I guess it is because of the small number of Indians in Singapore in contrast to the other races, that when a few of them speak good English, they would make a bigger impact in the generalisation that most speak good English.
Anyway, I do not think Singlish is just a combination of Chinese dialects. I don't know about Tamil, but I am pretty sure that it does include Malay words as mentioned in the previous comment.
- Keerthani (I know I am not in your group, and so you probably would not recognise my name. I just randomly chanced on your blog.)
Hey See Chai,
ReplyDeleteI think you might have the impression that most Indians speak well as most of us have to converse with people of the other races all the time. Having to speak with people who do not share the same mother tongue as you, forces you to practice your English speaking skills more. I bet the same would be for anyone from any race if they spoke English all the time.
With that said, people like me (as Keerthani mentioned), probably sent our Tamil teachers to an early grave as we included a lot of English words when we spoke in Tamil.
Here are some of my theories why there isn't much / any Tamil words in Singlish:
1) No one would understand the Tamil words since it is a minority language.
2) So why then Malay? Malay was our national language.
3) Most Indians came to Singapore with the British. Maybe they had a head start with English?
I think a Tamil infused English does exist but it is mainly used within the Indian community. However at the end of the day, I think the type of English you use depends on who you hang out with. For me, I use more Singlish since most of my friends are Chinese or Chindian. As for my sister, she sprouts Malinglish once in a while since she has more Malay friends. Hope this helps!
Geraldine
P.S. Your post was really interesting.
Hey all
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting and enlightening me. I've never heard Tamil words added into English before because as Geraldine said I would not have understood it at all. Thanks so much for sharing about the presence of Tamil in English and vice versa.
Actually i kind of feel bad for all the language teachers because no matter how hard they try students will always flood them with their "cosmopolitan" English.
We are constantly exposed to poor language like Singlish and unless we keep a concious effort to speak and write good English we will always be speaking our variant of English which might cause communication breakdown when dealing with non Singaporeans.
Thanks all for reading
Cheers
See Chai
See Chai,
ReplyDeleteI don't think it would be correct to ever say that Singlish has just this or just that. Language is as dynamic as other components of culture. Certainly the evolution of Singlish includes elements from any of the groups who have ever used it.
Think of a market where you have people of many different backgrounds interacting. They need to communicate with each other, and by doing so, they all contribute to the development of a common form of understanding each other.
The verb "boleh" is just one of many Malay words that can be found in use among many of the various inhabitants of Singapore. Some Malay sentence structures are also common, such as the dropping of the pronoun in a declarative statement. Instead of people saying "I don't know" they might say "don't know," similar to "tak tahu." My understanding of Hokkien is nil. How would you say "I don't understand" in Hokkien? Is a pronoun used or not?
Since Singlish is a creation of Singaporeans, it should contain some Indian languages too. My hypothesis is that there is just too big a proportion of Chinese and Malay language users. The chances of them understanding and including the use of Indian language words are slim.
ReplyDeleteI think the pronoun can be dropped in Hokkien. (Can't say for sure. I know only a little Hokkien.) But I'm sure in Cantonese, the pronoun can be dropped for declarative statement.
m(don't) ming baak(understand) is usually used.
ngo(I) m(don't) ming baak(understand) is still used, mostly in writing.
Life is short, so I guess that is why we create short-forms for speech. The phrase can be further shorten to
m(don't) ming(understand).
Yes we cut away half the phrase.