How should Singaporeans speak English?

I have to thank my reader 7-8 for the question which is the basis of this article. He has left me this provocative question with regards to Miss Yun's attitude to English, on my previous post:

"This thing about the English accent is pretty strange. You are Chinese, why do you want to speak English like a caucasian? Why don't you speak English the way that other English-speaking Chinese people do it, like, the proper way?"

Perhaps Miss Yun needs this dictionary? 

I find 7-8's statement rather strange to begin with - it is almost as if there is a standard way for "English-speaking Chinese people" to speak English. Allow me to begin with my family to illustrate how even within a small family, there is a huge difference in the way we speak English. My dad is in his 70s and is Chinese-educated. He is a retired Chinese teacher and he barely speaks any English. As I explained to 7-8, there are two family friends, uncle Eric and uncle Rob - my dad calls them Ah-Leet and Pok. Now you know why they had to translate the names of MRT stations for people like my dad, he calls Raffles Place "Lepers Prays".  Given that he speaks Malay fluently, he manages to avoid speaking English most of the time in Singapore, as he would use Mandarin, Malay and a range of Chinese dialects.  I have heard my dad struggle on in English with an Indian-Singaporean before... The poor Indian guy looked so confused, like, "uncle, sorry what are you trying to say?" You get the idea.  

Then there's my mother who is in her late 60s - unlike my father, she went to an English school and was educated in English, not Chinese. She is a retired primary school teacher - she taught English, maths and science at a primary school in Ang Mo Kio. Her English is far from perfect though - she would come up with expressions like, "The noodle you got heat up or not?" (Have you reheated the noodles?) "Can you close the light?" (Can you turn off the lights?) "How come you never do your homework one?" (Why haven't you done your homework?) You get the idea, I remember how she used to give tuition in our dining room and I would cringe each time she made a mistake like that - like hello, these parents are paying you good money for you to teach their kids standard English, not Singlish lah. You want to anyhow talk campur-campur rojak-rojak with aku and anyhow macam lagi boleh lah, Limpeh loves Singlish one - but good grief, are these kids going to use her brand of English at their PSLE exams? Groan. She would struggle with words like "primary" - it always sounds like "prembary", like, where is the B in the word "primary"? 

"Lepers Prays!" 

Then there are my two sisters - who are both NUS graduates and are working professionals in Singapore today. I speak to them our unique blend Singlish - which is Singlish + a generous dose of Hokkien and a little Mandarin but I have heard the way they speak English with their friends: it is English but with a Singaporean accent. So words like "this" and "with" will become "dis" and "wif" and they would make no differentiation between words like "little" and "litter" (they are not homophones). Once in a while, they may use rather Singlish expressions but of course, they would only use Singlish with fellow Singaporeans and not foreigners. 

Then there's me. I am getting to that stage where I have spent almost half my life in Europe and the Middle East, so naturally, I do not have a Singaporean accent any more for the simple reason that I have not been surrounded by Singaporeans since May 1997 - that's a pretty long time ago. I supposed sound more British today - though my accent has been described as "mid-Atlantic" - a blend of both North American, European and British influences but not easily placed geographically. I would sound a lot more British and proper when I am in a business meeting, when I know that I am representing the good name of my employers. When I am with friends, I am a lot more relaxed and would use a wider range of vocabulary from other languages - an example is the word, अच्छा  (Acha!) I am very fond of that word, it is a Hindi word used to express agreement, like "oh yes" or "okay". 

Friend: Have you heard? Rajoo has just proposed to his girlfriend. 

Limpeh: Acha! Did she say yes? 

Friend: Of course she did. They're getting married at the end of the year. 

Limpeh: Acha! That's great news, wow!

Now you may think that I am showing off but given that I speak ten languages competently and get by in over 20, it just reflects the way I think in a variety of languages. No kidding, I may write mostly in English but my thoughts are well and truly multilingual. There is another word I am very fond of: 진짜 (Jinjja!). 진짜 can be used as an interjection in Korean meaning "really?!" If you watch K-dramas, you'll be familiar with it.

Friend: Have you heard? Sam has just been fired. 

Limpeh: Jinjja!? But why? Everyone likes him. 

Friend: The boss caught him stealing something from the office at lunchtime. 

Limpeh: Jinjja!? Why would he do something like that?

"Jinjja?! Has Sam really been fired?!"

Sometimes I would confuse my friends my combining the two. None of my friends speak both Hindi and Korean but usually they can figure it out from the context. (Maybe Indian expats working in Korea would speak both Hindi and Korean? There can't be that many people who speak both Hindi and Korean.)

Limpeh: How much do I owe you for sushi?
Friend: Oh nothing. It's on me, it's my treat.
Limpeh: Acha, jinjja? Cheers mate.

"How much do I owe you for the sushi?"

I also like to repeat the same word in different languages to emphasize a point. I do not expect the other person to understand every word I say, but it's more the tone of my voice when saying the words that conveys the tone of the message, such as in the following example:

Friend: Did you manage to get anything at the sales today?
Limpeh: Nada, keine, niente, rien du tout, tiada, dim byd o gwbl, niechyevo, simi ma'bo lah! All the good stuff was already gone, I got there too late. Typical.

"Did you manage to get anything at the sales today?"

Now my friends are quite used to my foreign interjections which would come from random languages from Welsh to Russian to Arabic but I would never talk like at work.  So I have three modes of English: my work mode, ie. "business English", then there's "Limpeh's English" for my friends and of course, Singlish for my Singaporean friends & family. 

But there you go, even within my family, only my two sisters speak in a similar manner (and even then, they have their individual quirks). My mother sounds nothing like my father in English and I don't sound like any of my other family members. So if different members of a family from Ang Mo Kio can't even speak English the same way, how can 1.3 billion Han Chinese people (ie. the worldwide Chinese disapora) possibly all speak English the same way? 

Can you assume at all Chinese people will speak English in the same way? 

By the same token, there isn't one way for Caucasian people to speak English - a German person will speak English with a German accent, a Greek person will have a Greek accent, ditto with the French, Italian, Norwegians etc. Even within England, there are huge variations in terms of regional accents and what you do have here is a process whereby people attach certain values to certain kinds of accents. In England, it is not just your geographical location that will determine your accent, but also your social class.

There is a very clear concept of social class in British society and one of the key ways to identify a person's social class is one's accent. So within ten seconds, it is possible to establish the speaker's social background solely based on the way s/he speaks. It is actually pretty obvious for those who are very familiar with the full range of British accents. It's not a question of being judgemental - it's simply something we apply to try to understand the person we are talking. You could call it reading between the lines. 

So, let's take stock of two facts: 

1. Not all British people speak English the same way. 
2. Not all Chinese people speak English the same way.  (Heck, Chinese people don't even speak Mandarin the same way by that same token - there are so many regional accents!)

Now what is interesting about the case of Singapore is that English has been very much a part of our social landscape since 1819. It is a lingua franca for the Chinese, Malays, Indians and other ethnicities to communicate with. So there is quite a clear concept of how one speaks English in Singapore and this concept is something that has developed over many decades. Even within Singapore though, there is a hierarchy for accents. I would speak Singlish when I am conversing with a hawker or a taxi driver - but when I am in business meeting, I would default to business English. I am simply code switching to fit the occasion. Have a listen to the clip below - it is clear that even within Singapore, Singaporeans do not hesitate to make fun of those who speak English badly, often with comical consequences.

Now I happen to speak Welsh very well - I have completed an advance diploma in Welsh and it is probably my joint-fourth language now (with Spanish) after English, French and Mandarin. I'm not fluent yet, but I would consider myself a competent speaker of Welsh - I can have long, complex conversations in Welsh. There are only about 600,000 speakers of Welsh worldwide and maybe you have a few Welsh expats working in Singapore who do speak Welsh, but none of the locals in Singapore would speak any Welsh. Now it is possible to speak Welsh with a Singaporean accent, but if I did that, no one would understand a word of what I am saying. There are two forms of Welsh - Northern Welsh from North Wales and Southern Welsh from South Wales. Non-Welsh learners like myself are simply told, "choose either one and stick to it". I picked Southern Welsh. There isn't a third option, "Apply your own accent and speak it the way you wanna speak it." No, it doesn't work like that when you learn a foreign language. 

When you learn a foreign language, it is important to be humble. When I learn Welsh, I want to learn to sound authentically Welsh. When I learn Korean, I want to learn to sound authentically Korean. If I spoke Welsh or Korean with a Singaporean accent, then guess what? I have failed. A vital part of learning a new language is to listen, imitate and reproduce the sound of the words accurately. Now going back to Yun (from my previous article), she is from Beijing and English is not a local language in China - it is in fact a foreign language. That is she she aspired to speak English like an English person - rather than someone from China who is struggling with English as a foreign language.

Have you ever tried learning a foreign language?

After all, like myself, Yun has spent many years in the UK surrounded by British people - she didn't grow up in China, she grew up in England. She has spent far more time in the UK than in China or Singapore. As a child, she learnt English organically by listening to the British people around her and copying the way they spoke English - that is why she sounds totally white when she speaks English. It has nothing to do with her denying her Chinese cultural roots or heritage - she also speaks native standard Beijing-Mandarin. She expresses her Chinese identity via the Chinese language - it has absolutely nothing to do with the way she speaks English (or any other language). 

For learners of foreign languages like myself, our aim is always to achieve native standard (or near-native standard) in the language of our choice, rather than sound like a foreigner struggling on in the language despite having spent years studying the language. It takes 3,000 hours of study to become truly fluent in a language - I've so far put in about 1,000 hours into my Welsh. To be blunt, if you've put in 3,000 hours and still sound like a foreigner with a very strong non-standard accent, then clearly you're not doing it right. A person ends up with an accent because s/he doesn't pronounce the words correctly or doesn't do it exactly right. Here's a clip of a short Welsh news report below for you if you have never ever heard Welsh spoken before (don't blame you, so few people speak it). Now my aim as a learner is to be able to speak like that and sound authentically Welsh, rather than like a foreigner struggling with the language.

Take a language like Korean for example, trying to differentiate the single-J and double-J "JJ" constant sounds in a word like 진짜 "Jinjja" is very tricky! The difference between the single-J and the double-J "JJ" is so subtle. The only way to get your head around it is by listening to a native speaker say the word over and over again, trying to imitate it and getting a native speaker to correct your pronunciation. It's bloody hard work, it's not easy!

And no, you do not get to say, "fuck it, I'm just going to say it my way." No sir, you do not get to change the rules of Korean as a foreigner learning Korean as a foreign language. You jolly well obey the rules of the Korean language if you want to become fluent in Korean. No ifs, no buts, no excuses damnit! I simply applying that same rigorous academic discipline when it comes to learning English - I don't debate whether it is my mother tongue or my first language, I simply follow the rules because I don't have the right to change the rules to suit my whims.  None of us do - we all have to follow the rules. Such is life, tough shit, get used to it.

At this point, I am going to allow 7-8 to speak for himself as he did do a follow up post on the topic. He obviously knows quite a lot about the issue of learning languages and it is interesting that he mentions Korean as well in his post below:

For Singaporeans, we have to be very careful about distinguishing three things: bad English, Singlish and Singapore accented standard English. So when your friend complains about our accent, either she is really complaining about the third or she's intellectually sloppy enough to confuse the three. Either way she needs to get whacked. For a foreigner to criticise bad / substandard English, that's OK, and a lot of Singaporeans need to brush up on their standards of English. I don't expect foreigners to learn everything about Singlish, although sometimes they confuse Singlish with bad English - can't be helped. But when a Singaporean in Singapore takes care of grammar, subject verb agreements, speaks clearly and slowly but leaves in the accent, it's the foreigner who has to adapt. 

Like when I'm in Yankeeland, every time I come across words which are different from British English, I will use the American version. And I learnt something new even a few years later - Americans pronounce "thorough" differently from the British. I try to be careful to talk about the trunk rather than the boot, or the elevator rather than the lift.

There is a balance to be struck, of course. If you are a foreigner learning Korean, you don't really expect Koreans to automatically learn your accent. You try to make yourself as well understood as you can. 

English is different. There is no one version of English. The country in the world with the most English speakers is not even an angmoh country anymore. It is India. All the issues that I outlined above come into play when you're amongst a large population of native English speakers who have a slightly different version of English: in Liverpool, in Ireland, among American Blacks, in India, Phillippines, Jamaica, Australia, East Africa, West Africa, etc etc. Any community who has people who speaks English well enough and for long enough deserves to have their own version of English. Any foreigner who goes to those places (including myself) has to adapt to the local accent. You simply don't go to India or Australia and ask the English speaking people there to please speak English with a London accent. This is not arrogance or defensiveness, it is common sense. We can correct our grammar. We can leave out the slang. The accent is unfortunately a different matter.

This is where 7-8 and I part company. I think there is a balance to be struck between recognizing a local accent in places like India, the Philippines, Jamaica, Nigeria etc and being condescending to the locals who are trying to learn English in these places. I have worked with people from India and have talked about this quagmire with one of them and he has explained to me the challenges one faces as a learner of English in India. Let's call him Raj.

Raj said that whilst many Indians speak English, they tend to have a rather strong, even comical accent which makes them incomprehensible to those who are not from India. There is a big call-centre in his hometown which serves one of the main UK banks and they will not employ anyone who has a strong accent. Most of all, the bank doesn't want the customer to have to struggle to understand the customer services representative - it doesn't sit well with the image of the bank.  Raj told me point blank, "I don't want to speak with an outrageous Indian accent, it just sends out all the wrong messages. You think we Indian people don't realize what an Indian accent sounds like? I know that, you know that, everyone knows that - fuck being PC." Please watch the clip below.

Raj pointed out that better educated younger Indians tend to speak English either with a British or American accent and it tends to be those who are less educated who would have a rather strong Indian accent. So it is not as if Indian people (or Chinese people for that matter) are totally incapable of speaking English with a British or American accent, it just boils down to the following four factors:

1. How much time and effort the learner is willing to dedicate to learning the language
2. How rich the learner is - can you pay for lessons, extra tuition, books etc.
3. How talented the learner is with languages - some people have a gift, others don't.
4. Is the learner already surrounded by people who speak English well?

How much time have you spent studying the language? 3000 hours? 

I resent the thought that Chinese-speakers are somehow incapable of speaking English like Caucasians. There are Chinese people like my dad who calls Raffles Place "Lepers Prays" but not all Chinese people are like that! I refer you to the list above - my dad spent very little time, made little effort to learn English and as a child growing up, no one in his family spoke any English. He was educated at a Chinese school. That is why he has this ridiculous accent when he tries to speak English - it is not that he is somehow genetically predisposed to speaking English badly because of his Chinese DNA. (Well, he's probably mostly Chinese, I am mixed, according to my DNA test.)

It's not like Chinese people have short tongues so we can't speak English properly. Heck, I have deliberately chosen to learn languages like Welsh and Russian because they contain so many sounds that most non-native speakers would find very hard to replicate successfully. For me, it's an intellectual exercise, it's an academic challenge. It's simply a game where I listen, I memorize and I repeat until it comes out right. The same rule applies to learning any language. It's not always all work and no play: I love memorizing the lyrics of my favourite K-pop songs and then singing them. It's a great way to improve my Korean. So yes, I can sing along to Gangnam Style.

Do you demand high standards of yourself when learning a language?

If I want to express my Chinese identity, I will do via the medium of the Chinese language. I do speak Mandarin fluently  and it is the language I use to communicate with my dad, who doesn't speak English. I am also very fond of Hokkien, my mother's mother tongue. I find 7-8's suggestion really quite racist and offensive, that somehow Chinese people express their cultural identity by speaking English with a stereotypical Chinese accent. Good grief. How racist is that. Cue racist jokes about Chinese people who say things like, "flied lice". Hell no. Don't even go there. That is so racist man! If a white person had come up with that, I would have attacked that white person for being racist and offensive. But... wait, it is a Chinese Singaporean person (who actually knows me in real life) who has come up with it, that is why I am taking a step back and exploring this properly. What is going on here? Is there an element of self-hatred on his part? Does he doubt his ability to learn a foreign language and adjust his accent accordingly?

Singaporeans really suck at languages when compared to people from countries like Switzerland, Finland and Holland where most people are properly fluent in at least 2 or 3 languages and speak several more. Most younger Singaporeans get by in English and have only a basic, limited grasp of their second language, thanks to a dumbed down O and AO level syllabus. Many older Singaporeans really struggle with English. Furthermore, a strong Singaporean accent renders English hard to understand by those from outside Singapore and Malaysia. When it comes to Mandarin, the PRCs and Taiwanese mock the Singaporeans for having such a poor command of Chinese, especially when it comes to reading and writing.. Even the standard of Malay amongst younger Singaporeans is a lot lower than in Malaysia or Indonesia. The fact is, we don't have a language of our own called "Singaporean". Heck, there's only Singlish and that's not a patois that is understood outside Singapore and Malaysia.

Face it. Singaporeans are always going to be speaking someone else's language whether you like it or not. You may lay claim to English and assert that because you have spoken it as a nation for so many years, your version of English is totally valid. But even as an academic endeavour, shouldn't you challenge yourself to learn standard English rather stamp your feet and insist that the way you speak English is absolutely perfect and that anyone who dares to criticize it is a racist? Just calm down for a minute and stop being so defensive and insecure.

English is not a language from Singapore, neither is Mandarin. When you learn English or Mandarin, sure there is a local variant of the language which breaks many rules of the language but you should always strive to achieve an internationally-accepted native standard of English if you intend to use the language with people who are from other parts of the world. Have you ever wondered how you would sound like to a foreigner from halfway around the world? Do you want to be understood? Or are you going to stamp your feet and say, "if you have a problem with my accent, the fuck you you're the racist and I don't want to talk to you." And if your Asian identity means that much to you - how about expressing all that Asian passion in Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hainanese, Malay, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia or Tamil instead of the white man's language? Don't you guys see how ironic this whole situation is? Duh.

Would a Singaporean be easily understood here in New York?

In conclusion, if a Chinese person like Miss Yun can speak BBC-RP standard English, then I say, that's brilliant, good for her. That's what we should aspire to - we should all aspire to speak several languages, all to native standard if possible. Do not make any excuses about how people from your part of the world speak a certain way, that's rubbish, that's not a valid excuse. No one said learning foreign languages is easy - but if you are willing to work bloody hard at it, then you will be able to nail the accent and sound like a native speaker. After all, just because my dad says "Lepers Prays", it doesn't mean that my linguistic abilities will follow in his footsteps.

So! Over to you, what do you think? Why is one's accent such an emotive subject in Singapore? How do you speak English? Do you think you have a strong accent? Are you defensive about the way you speak English? Do you think Singaporeans speak English well? You know the drill, leave a comment below - thanks!