Identifying the social correlates of Singlish: The relationship between Singlish-ness and locally relevant meanings — The Association Specialists
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  2. SESSION 3: Language, culture, and socialization A
  3. Identifying the social correlates of Singlish: The relationship between Singlish-ness and locally relevant meanings

Identifying the social correlates of Singlish: The relationship between Singlish-ness and locally relevant meanings (19981)

Yin Lin Tan 1 2 , Ting Lin 1 , Meghan Sumner 1
  1. Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States of America
  2. English, Linguistics and Theater Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore

An indexical account of variation requires linguists to identify what social meanings are indexed by salient linguistic features. This study aims to further such an account of English in Singapore by investigating the social correlates of Singlish, a local, colloquial variety of English. We argue that Singlish indexes social meanings of roughness, casualness, and properness.

In Task 1, 132 participants selected which of two natural-speech audio clips sounded more Singlish within two seconds. The task comprised six blocks of 20 trials and 40 stimuli from 10 speakers. A follow-up questionnaire collected information about participants’ sociolinguistic background and asked participants to describe more Singlish-sounding speakers. Singlish scores for each clip, i.e., the probability of being chosen as more Singlish, were generated using Markov chains (Billingsley, 1961). In Task 2, 50 participants rated the 40 clips on six attributes (Rough, Honest, Casual, Easygoing, Fast-speaking, and Proper) selected from Task 1’s questionnaire responses.

Bayesian ordinal mixed effects regression models were fit for each attribute with Singlish score as a fixed effect, by-participant random slope for Singlish score, and random intercepts of clip and speaker. The 95% credible interval for Singlish score in the Rough [17.15, 64.87], Casual [40.42, 80.77], and Proper [-125.02, -70.15] models did not include zero. Therefore, more Singlish speech was perceived to be more rough and casual but less proper.

The correlation of Singlish scores with casualness and properness score aligns with how Singlish is positioned in dominant discourse as non-standard, and therefore relegated to informal domains, like the home (Chng, 2003). Listeners’ perceptions of more Singlish clips as rougher may arise from a general association of colloquial, working-class varieties with toughness and roughness (Cheshire, 2008). These findings help disambiguate relevant social meanings for Singlish and provide reference points for future variationist work on English in Singapore.

  1. Billingsley, P. (1961). Statistical methods in Markov chains. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 32(1), 12-40.
  2. Cheshire, J. (2008). Sex and gender in variationist research. In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, & N. Schilling (Eds.), The handbook of language variation and change (p. 423-443). John Wiley & Sons.
  3. Chng, H. H. (2003). “You see me no up”: Is Singlish a problem? Language Problems and Language Planning, 27(1), 45-62.