Do Singaporeans speak Singlish as their first language?

I enjoy going to my gymnastics club because it is a very international environment and I usually get to practice a multitude of languages simply by chatting to the other gymnasts there. I was chatting to a gymnast in Russian when this other gymnast asked me a question, "what is your first language?" She didn't understand Russian, but she was wondering if I had been chatting to this Russian person in my mother tongue. I explained that my mother tongue is English and I am simply practicing my Russian. This monolingual Australian guy (let's call him Mel - since he is from Melbourne) then jumped into the conversation and said, "your mother tongue is Singlish, not English - you're from Singapore!" It was his attempt to be funny and perhaps show off a bit of knowledge about Singapore, but I took offence given that I speak over 20 languages so being a monolingual Aussie, Mel really had no right to try to show off in this department. If it was his attempt to demonstrate some kind of knowledge about the cultures and languages of Singapore, he had failed miserably and had simply caused offence. Now I could have this whole serious conversation to try to explain to him why what he said was inappropriate and offensive, but I thought, what's the point - Mel behaved like that because of his very poor social skills. I can't fix that even if I forced him to apologize; but I can choose to exclude him from my social life. Thus I took out my phone, blocked him on Facebook and resolved to simply ignore him from now on.

I did recall a conversation with Mel some time back when he asked me if I knew about this Singaporean TV programme called Under One Roof which ran from the period 1995 to 2003. I said yes of course, I lived in Singapore till 1997 so I am familiar with the sitcom. Well, he said that when he was living in Melbourne, the channel AXN would regularly show Under One Roof and the kids in school would make fun of the "stupid way you Singaporeans struggled speaking basic English" and that the white kids would regularly mock Singaporeans for the way they spoke. Yes, that was indeed as racist as it sounded. Now here's the irony: Mel isn't white, he is Asian as well but since he was born in Australia, he never got to learn his parents' mother tongue since they never taught him Vietnamese and thus he ended up being completely monolingual like the vast majority of Australians. It was through such programmes that many Australians became acquainted with the culture of Singapore and I did actually spend some time looking up clips of Under One Roof on Youtube - was the accent in that programme really that hard to understand? Did it make the characters sound stupid and inarticulate, as if they were struggling with English and were clearly more comfortable speaking another Asian language? Then again, am I the best judge of how they came across given that I was brought up in Singapore and I am extremely familiar with the way the locals speak, so I can obviously understand them easily. So whilst I can appreciate that a Singaporean accent may sound unusual or even rather hard to understand for most Australians, was Mel's outburst justified? Since I did come from a working class Singaporean family after all, hence can my mother tongue be Singlish? 

Singapore is a country with 5.8 million people so obviously you treat all Singaporeans as a monolithic entity, you cannot assume that all Singaporeans have the same mother tongue or first language - given the complex mix of people of different ethnic groups, religions, ancestry, cultures and social classes, you end up with a very multi-lingual society which uses English as a lingua franca.  There is a sliding scale from people who speak English flawlessly as a first language to those who have virtually no knowledge of English - take my late grandmother for example, never mind English, she couldn't even speak Mandarin and she spoke only Hokkien and Malay. Yet she was born in Singapore, spent all her life in Singapore and died in Singapore. Her mother tongue would definitely be Hokkien. Then you have people like my father who speak a little English but would prefer using Mandarin in his everyday communications. His mother tongue is Hakka, but you could argue that Mandarin is his first language since there is very limited use for Hakka in Singapore and he has been using Mandarin for virtually all his communications in the last few decades. But since the education system in Singapore is entirely in English, most highly educated Singaporeans end up speaking English as a first language as that's the language they were educated in, so their ability to speak their Asian mother tongue would pale in comparison.

So on one end of the spectrum, you have Singaporeans speak English as a first language and on the other end of the spectrum, there are the Singaporeans who would speak Mandarin, Hokkien, Malay or Tamil as their first language instead of English and it is the people in the middle who are pretty hard to classify along with those like me who do not fit this rather simplistic model. Thus the question is whether or not it is possible for someone to speak Singlish as a first language - now we're not talking about English with a Singaporean accent, we're talking about 100% full blown Singlish here. And I think that's virtually impossible or at best, highly unlikely - like the best case scenario would be very small proportion of Singaporeans who could rightfully consider Singlish their first language. Allow me to explain why: of course there are people like my father who struggle with English and his attempts at speaking English could be at best described as Singlish. But is that his mother tongue or first language? Hell no. My father is totally fluent in Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese and Mandarin and he even has a decent grasp of Malay though that is somewhat rusty today but it is still better than his English. So a lot of of the older Singaporeans like my father would not claim Singlish as their first language simply because they would rightfully claim an Asian language as their first language and mother tongue. Likewise, it isn't uncommon to  to find lower-working class Chinese Singaporeans to have a preference for using Mandarin over English in their everyday communications - if you dropped out of school very early and if your parents spoke Malay, Tamil, Mandarin or Hokkien at home, then you're less likely to end up with English as your first language.

So how did I end up with English as my first language despite having parents who don't speak it as a first language? In one word: education. As a child, I grew up with a situation whereby I used English at school but spoke mostly in Mandarin and Hokkien at home with my parents. Now if I had tried to use Singlish in the classroom, like if I wrote a sentence like this in my homework, "I ask my mother she got close the light in the room or not." The teacher would mark that as incorrect and reprimand me for the use of non-standard English, the correct way to express the same information would be, "I asked my mother if she had turned off the light in the room." Education in Singapore was conducted in standard English, not Singlish - having an Asian accent was tolerated, even accepted but the distinction between English and Singlish was very clear. So here's my hypothesis: the Singaporeans who are well-educated will by default switch to having English as a first language because of the education system. But on the other hand, those who do not do well in the education system would then have an Asian language like Mandarin, Malay, Tamil or Hokkien as their mother tongue. Can there be any specific combination of circumstances whereby a person in Singapore can end up speaking only Singlish as their first language and mother tongue? Well, I think it is rather unlikely but nonetheless still actually possible.

The first hypothesis is that you have a Singaporean who loves Singlish so much that he chooses to communicate only in Singlish and never/rarely in English. This is quite unlikely but still at a push, possible. Now clearly, there are plenty of people in Singapore who really do love Singlish, but how many would go to such lengths to artificially create a situation whereby Singlish would somehow take precedence over English (and any other language) to become their primary language of daily communication? Hence it would be extraordinary to go to such lengths and I doubt even the most enthusiastic aficionados of Singlish wouldn't do that because you can love Singlish and be passionate about it without having to use it as your first language. After all, someone who puts himself in such a situation would be fine communicating with most people in Singapore but the moment he tries to speak to someone from Los Angeles, Toronto, Edinburgh, Auckland or Melbourne, he would probably run into a lot of difficulty. Nonetheless, we live in an age when we can self-identify everything from our gender to sexual orientation to our ethnicity to our cultural identity so if a Singaporean wants to claim that Singlish is indeed his mother tongue and first language, well then we can't actually stop him from doing so. However, the likelihood of anyone in Singapore doing so is pretty darn low given that even those who truly adore Singlish would be also quite keen to point out that they are well-educated enough to speak standard English.

The second hypothesis involves a former classmate from my primary school many years ago. Meet Lawan (not her real name): she had a Thai father and a Singaporean-Chinese mother. Her mother met her father whilst working in Bangkok and Lawan was born there, however, the relationship broke down, they got divorced and Lawan's mother decided to bring her back to Singapore where she thought her daughter would have a better education in Singapore. Lawan spoke a little Thai when she began primary school, but her primary language was English. Since her father was in Thailand and she only saw her father a few times a year, she soon forgotten what little Thai she had and her mother made little effort to teach her Mandarin, believing that the school would do a much better job. However, Lawan failed every single Chinese test and exam in school because there was just too huge a gap between the Singaporean kids who already grew up speaking Mandarin at home with their parents and Lawan who had virtually no knowledge of Mandarin. By the time she got to primary three, Lawan was so completely lost in the Chinese lessons and the sensible thing to do would be to allow her to learn Chinese with the primary one kids, but unfortunately that was not permitted under the system then. So instead, Lawan was simply allowed to 'drop' Chinese as a subject since it was pointless trying to take it any further when she wasn't understanding a word of what the Chinese teacher was saying. Mind you, it was not like Lawan's English was brilliant - she was rather stupid. Her English sucked but it was her only language as she became effectively monolingual since her Thai had become non-existent after many years in Singapore. So under those circumstances, yes so Lawan was a Singaporean who spoke Singlish as a first language - whether she would admit to that however, is another story.

So both hypothesis are totally possible: of course there are people in Singapore who are so passionate about Singlish that they would claim it as their mother tongue and first language - then there are people like Lawan who somehow turn out to be monolingual English/Singlish speaking Singaporeans because of their highly unusual circumstances. Do either of those hypothesis apply to me? Clearly not. I speak 20 languages to begin with - that's highly unusual hence I am not your typical Singaporean. Don't get me wrong; whilst I do like Singlish, I have made it very clear that my first language is English and my mother tongue is in fact Hokkien - my first language is English because I have been educated in English whilst my mother tongue is Hokkien because that was the language I spoke with my late grandmother when she took care of me when I was very little. I see Singlish as an important part of the language landscape of Singapore, but I have certainly never spoken Singlish with non-Singaporeans like Mel. So if Mel were to ask me how many Singaporeans actually spoke Singlish as a first language or mother tongue, I would say that the number is actually pretty darn small. So if you were to look at the Singaporeans who claim to speak English as a first language (rather than an Asian language), then how many of them are actually speaking Singlish rather than English? Again, that number would be tiny - remember that people like my father who speak English really badly don't even speak English as a first language or mother tongue.

I have a pretty clear idea as to when English with a Singaporean accent slides into Singlish. The thing is in Under One Roof, the characters tend to speak in English with a Singaporean accent most of the time and only use Singlish occasionally. English becomes Singlish when two important things happen: firstly, the grammar changes to a system based on Chinese and/or Malay rather than English. So take the question, "does your older sister have any children?"" Note that I can turn that into Singlish without using any loanwords from another language but simply using Chinese grammar, "Your big sister got children or not?". (你的姐姐有孩子吗?) The words in the sentence have been simply rearranged according to Chinese grammar, but we haven't used any loanwords at all - yet it does already sounds quite Singaporean. The second and more common way English turns into Singlish is the use of loanwords mostly from Mandarin, Hokkien, and Malay but occasionally Cantonese and Tamil. Here's the thing, when I watch a Singaporean programme like Under One Roof, I hear Singaporeans speaking English with a Singaporean accent but it is still English - mmost Australians like Mel however, immediately assume that it is Singlish because of the unfamiliar accent that renders the English hard to understand at times. Thus Mel reminds me of that character Marjorie Dawes from the Little Britain sketch, who cannot understand a word of what the Indian character Meera simply because of her strong Indian accent. 

A further layer of irony is that Mel speaks English with a very strong Australian accent - the fact is English is the primary language not just in the UK, but in Ireland, Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand - but the list goes on: Singapore, Jamaica, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, South Africa, Fiji, St Lucia, in fact the list is so long I can't name them all but these are primarily former British colonies. Thus the English is each of these territories is quite different and distinct, so an American from Texas speaking English would sound very different from someone from County Kerry in Ireland but it is still the same language, albeit with a different accent. I experienced this recently at my mother-in-law's funeral recently where our American relatives showed up and chatted with the many Irish relatives and friends of the family - sure the accents were very different indeed but we understood each other perfectly well. No, you'll have to go quite far before it becomes a different language and a very good example of that is Tok Pisin, one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea and it is a creole of English that is so different from English that it is considered a different language. Sure you may be able to read some of it when it does correspond with English, but try listening to the news bulletin below read in Tok Pisin - sure you may be able to pick out the English words but overall, it was virtually impossible for me to understand what was being said. Whilst it is possible to use so many loanwords that we can render Singlish impossible for a non-Singaporean to understand, but at what stage does it stop being Singlish and when does it becomes Mandarin, Tamil, Malay or Hokkien with some English words thrown in? This is quite unlike Tok Pisin and other creole languages.

So for someone like Mel to assume that Singlish must be my first language and mother tongue just because I'm from Singapore is simply incorrect. The situation in Singapore is far more complex of course and I doubt Mel knows that much about Singapore apart from having watched a few episodes of Under One Roof when he was younger. I don't think there's anything wrong with Under One Roof - it was a Singaporean sitcom created by Singaporeans for Singaporeans with a Singaporean cast speaking Singlish. As to why AXN thought it would be a good idea to show it to Australians, I have no idea. The programme is great for a Singaporean audience but might be somewhat lost in translation with an Australian audience. Did I want to have this in-depth discussion about the complex linguistic landscape of Singapore with Mel? No, I don't think so - he made that assertion about me speaking Singlish as my first language in a bid to impress me and be funny, but failed on both counts. I just think that he has appallingly bad social skills and I can't fix that - I'm not interested in trying to address his shortcomings when it comes to his social skills, so I decided that I would have this rather intellectual discussion here on my blog with my readers and simply resolve to ignore Mel from now on. I spoke to my friend David (whom I interviewed recently for my blog) and he told me, "that's just racist bullshit. When I was in Singapore, most people spoke better English than me." I shall resolve to focus my energies on good friends like David!

That's it from me on this topic, what do you think? Have you met people like Mel who can't tell the difference between English with a Singaporean accent and Singlish? What would you do if an Australian assumed that you spoke Singlish when you're really speaking standard English (albeit with a Singaporean accent)? Is Mel really just an annoying git - was he trying to make fun of the way I speak English or was he trying to impress me that he knows about Singlish? Either way, I have no desire to be his friend anymore. And finally, how many of you remember Under One Roof? How do you think an Australian audience would react to Under One Roof? Do leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.