Go to theallusionist.org/singlish to listen to this episode and find out more information about it.

This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, am - stop - being tickled by language - stop - get off - this is very invasive.

Today we’re talking about a small country with a very rich and complicated language situation: Singapore. This is just a little snapshot of it via one person’s experience, and more specifically about the language Singlish.

I’d love to hear from you if you’re a therapist who specialises in emotions related to languages - such as childhood languages you don’t use any more - because yes, people get therapy for that, and wouldn’t it be interesting to hear about it?

We’ve got some Allusional events coming up in Vancouver BC - a meetup on 20 October 2024, and in January 2025 a live show to celebrate this podcast’s 10th birthday! Yes! Go to theallusionist.org/events for information about these events.

And take yourself to theallusionist.org/donate to become a member of the Allusioverse for as little as $2 a month, to help keep this show afloat financially and to get a lot of fun stuff for your trouble, including relaxing livestreams with me and my dictionary collection, behind the scenes info about the making of every episode, and the company of your fellows in the Allusioverse Discord, where together we are watching a lot of stuff: the current season of Taskmaster featuring my brother Andy trying to master tasks; we’re watching both the Great British Bake Off and the Canadian version, and we’ve got a season of Merchant Ivory watchalongs - Remains of the Day and Howard’s End are coming up, tighten your tie to keep the emotions in! - and Hocus Pocus and What We Do In The Shadows. What a lot of delights! Join us at theallusionist.org/donate.

Content note: this episode contains one category B swear. And there are references to corporal punishment of children.

On with the show.

BIBEK GURUNG: The reason that I reached out to you, Helen, is I came across this article it was titled something like “Six words in Singlish that Taylor Swift used on her tour in Singapore".

HZ: The Singlish words were actually being used by Kameron Saunders, one of the dancers in Taylor Swift’s Eras tour: at of the six performances in Singapore in March 2024, during the bridge of the song ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’, Taylor Swift would pass the mic to Kameron who each time would drop a different phrase in Singlish.

BIBEK GURUNG: I was so shocked to see something about Singlish on a Singaporean publication. Growing up, I would never hear Singlish talked about with coolness or respect or anything like that. And it took this American pop star to go over there and to do that, have people on her tour say these words, to get this recognition.

HZ: There's been, I think, an increase in Singlish on like TV and in publications in Singapore, I gather, recently.

BIBEK GURUNG: Yeah.

HZ: That's an interesting development.

BIBEK GURUNG: I think there's been a greater recognition of the idea that it's its own thing. I don't know if the recognition that it's its own language or even the terminology of a creole language has taken on. There is more of an understanding of the uniqueness of Singlish, but it's almost phrased as if this makes us an interesting marketing or tourism prospect, that's how it comes across to me. For instance, with the Taylor Swift article, it's like, "It's good enough for her; why don't you, the rest of the world, pay attention?”
Hi, my name is Bibek Gurung. I am from Singapore. I'm actually a Nepali citizen and currently living in the United States. I was a linguistics student, a linguistics graduate, and no longer do that now, but I still delve into it for fun and party tricks.

HZ: That's a hell of a party trick. Like being able to, I don't know, do headstands or something - I have no party tricks. But I also don't have postgrad linguistics, so I feel very exposed whenever I talk to a qualified linguist.

BIBEK GURUNG: Well, I don't know how qualified I am anymore. I have the - what's the word? - the object permanence of a baby, so I've forgotten a lot of those things. but I'll try to be as helpful as I can today. I will say a lot of this is very specific to me because this is not a subject that we talked about when we were growing up. So I don't really have like a sort of a shared experience on a macro level about the politics of this thing. But it is honest to my experience.

HZ: Singlish emerged after 1965. English had been in use in Singapore since British colonisers plonked themselves there in 1819, but it hadn’t been all that common outside of official purposes like governance and law. But that changed after 1965, when Singapore had become an independent republic: the government thought the English language was necessary for Singapore to prosper economically by doing business internationally, and it was also their choice as a lingua franca for the linguistically diverse people of Singapore to communicate with each other. Thus English is the main language used in administration and education - although, more on that in a bit - and there are two main local versions.

BIBEK GURUNG: There's Singlish and there's Singaporean English, which is the version of English, which I would describe as a dialect of English. Which also is, because it's sort of confined to this one city state, kind of odd and has its own quirks.

HZ: Singaporean Standard English is not to be confused with Singaporean Colloquial English or Singlish. The former is a dialect of English, whereas Singlish, although its name is a a portmanteau of ‘Singapore’ and ‘English’, it combines many languages.

BIBEK GURUNG: One of the the charming things about Singlish is it is a mix of all of the languages of all of the different groups that live in Singapore, the Tamil people, Malay folks, Chinese people of various Chinese language backgrounds, like Teochew, Hokkien, or Mandarin. I remember this phrase once that I heard on the bus said by my friend: the buses have these seats that also face backwards towards the back of the bus, and we were about to sit down, and she said, "No, no, no. Aye. P'koi tso to palik." Which is three different languages in that sentence. "P'koi tso" is, like, Mandarin for “I can't sit.” And "terbalik" is from a Malay word meaning upside down or backwards. The proper Malay word for it is terbalik, but we say tombalik.
So, yeah, you get sentences like that with just a mishmash of different words, language influences.
The nature of Singlish being a language with such diverse vocabulary, and vocabulary origins, actually sort of lines up with the party line of the Singapore government, which is: we are a multicultural country. We have many races living together in harmony and we all respect each other. Whether that's true on the ground is a different story, so a different podcast. but they do like to portray the fact that we actually were able to achieve this thing where we are a bunch of different ethnicities and races living together. One of our public holidays where we get a day off at work or school is Racial Harmony Day, for instance. So I think that was something pointed to as kind of a positive about Singlish.

HZ: But in practice, is the Singapore government positive about Singlish? No!

BIBEK GURUNG: Growing up in Singapore, you kind of get a melange of just different languages anyway. My mother tongue, I suppose, is Nepali and Singlish was just also introduced to me at around the same time. And I grew up speaking Singlish on the playground at school and with my peers in Singapore. And my parents also learned a lot of the English through blue collar Singaporean folks. So they were learning Singlish and teaching that to me, whether they knew it or not. I go to nursery school at one and a half or two. And we're just speaking to each other in, in this, this Creole that two or three years later would be told, don't do that.

HZ: That’s rough. You just get competent at a language, and they slap it out of your mouth.

BIBEK GURUNG: Sometimes literally. And the whole time I was under the impression that actually it's not Singlish, it's bad or broken English. because in Singapore we also do have our primary education in English. So at the same time while we're in the school playground we're speaking Singlish, and then going into the classroom being taught this sort of British 50s era Jeeves and Wooster-type English. So you get the sense that you're not quite doing it right.

HZ: It sounds very confusing.

BIBEK GURUNG: Yeah, confusing and counterproductive.

HZ: How so, would you say?

BIBEK GURUNG: You grow up with the sense that if your first language, or one of your first languages, Singlish, actually a bad version of an already existing language, you kind of get this sense that “I'm just bad at language,” which is… language is a fundamental human skill. It's what separates us from the lemurs or whatever. And to just have this sense that you're bad at this very fundamental skill, I think, really does a number to your self esteem and your abilities to communicate in general. I still have a lot of - I don't know how to phrase it, maybe like cultural cringe - around Singlish. And when I meet someone from Singapore, we do sort of lapse into Singlish and communicate in that way, except if I'm with American friends and then I just feel so self conscious and I'm not able to do it. As a student of linguistics and someone who just knows about the sociolinguistic dynamics, I still find it really hard to shake.
I'm reminded of this: this is back in primary school, we had this was a new geography teacher who we were all very aware of the fact that had lived and studied in the US. And so this is like very exciting: this American woman is going to come to our school and teach us. Before this teacher came in and started her lessons, the principal came in a couple of days earlier and said, "You’d better bloody well make sure that your English is perfect. We don't want you to talk the way you usually do, okay? This is gonna make us look bad." This little anecdote is sort of a microcosm for the post colonial hangover that we have about not doing this right because we're not doing it in the way that, let's face it, our British masters were would have expected us to wanted us to do. Yeah, the most insidious thing about colonization is it happens in the brain too, and you let your subjects do it to themselves.

HZ: In the year 2000, the government of Singapore with a committee of private business leaders launched the Speak Good English Movement, with the objective of increasing the use of so-called standard English while reducing the use of Singlish and other languages. The campaign's tagline was "Speak Well, Be Understood", and over the years has included free English lessons, inter-school Scrabble tournaments, conferences for teachers, classes for students at all stages of education and for parents, writing workshops, reading events, storytelling competitions, apps, TV and radio broadcasts and awards, plus a series of comic books about grammar, contests for the photo of the most egregious examples of incorrect English on signs, and a theatre production called Fat Kids Are Harder To Kidnap.

HZ: Do you remember the Speak Good English Movement starting in 2000?

BIBEK GURUNG: Yes. I was about, I think, maybe seven or eight when the Speak Good English campaign kicked off. And I think the biggest crime was: the best sitcom locally produced at the time was Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd, about this contractor who's a blue collar guy named Phua Chu Kang. And his whole shtick is that he has a very sort of Anglicized in law family that he lives with, but he himself is very blue collar and and speaks English. And that was where a lot of the humour came from. Then the Speak Good English campaign happens, and they make him drop a lot of that. And he's not saying things like “Abuden”, which is a phrase that means something like, I don't even know how to translate it, like, "Well of course," something like that. So he stops saying things like that.

HZ: In the third season, the character was even shown to have completed an English course.

BIBEK GURUNG: And in some ways, spiritually, the Speak Good English campaign was always happening; you were always shamed about speaking and taught to, again, speak this, what was seen as standard English, but that was the standard English left by the British, back in the 1960s. For instance, I grew up thinking saying “jolly well” was a very normal thing to say still, like if your kid has the toys all over the floor around the room, saying like, "Well, you better jolly well pick up all your toys and put them back" - again, is this Wodehouse? Like, why are we saying this? This is so odd.

HZ: People are more comfortable with swearing now, hopefully. “Clean it up, you little shits!”

BIBEK GURUNG: We have such a rich vocabulary for swearing anyway, it's such a shame. On the way here back home from the office, I was trying to think of examples and all I could think of were swears and sort of inappropriate things, because the context in which you speak Singlish is very casual and cool and it's just bodies hanging out and being a bit rough and naughty, right? So the first the first association that I have with Singlish is that sort of fairly rough and tumble kind of social context. But there's no reason why you couldn't have a scientist at CERN who speaks Singlish as their primary language.
But I really think that the reason Singlish was seen as bad was because we're not being British enough. And it's from a time where being British meant you get the better jobs and you get the respect from the people that run the country. And even today, if you listen to a news broadcast or a news program, all the news anchors from Singapore sound kind of, or almost, British. Or, some of them sound Australian, which I think is, to them, British enough, Western white enough, to be acceptable.

HZ: We did our business there as well.

BIBEK GURUNG: Oh yeah, that's right - similar colonial histories.

HZ: We Englished it pretty hard.

BIBEK GURUNG: And for quite a while. So what happens when you have all these small, small and large, movements to remind you that the things that you were always saying are wrong is you just have this sense of - maybe it was just me, but a sense of self-consciousness about how you're communicating. Especially if you're communicating with someone from a different country, or someone British.

HZ: I mean. Just don't.

BIBEK GURUNG: I'm making one exception.

HZ: I was looking at the Speak Google English Movement's website and they've got this page with “Common English mistakes” and there's such weird nonsense choices, like the difference between ‘scared’ and ‘afraid’. And I don't think about the misuse of scared, like saying, “I am scared of the dark” rather than “I'm afraid of the dark.” What a weird one to pick up on.

BIBEK GURUNG: I'm actually surprised that this website is still up.

BIBEK GURUNG: So this is still sanctioned, I suppose.

HZ: What negative consequences were there to speaking Singlish in schools when all this was going on? Was it just like you knew it was bad, or were there punishments?

BIBEK GURUNG: I grew up in an era where corporal punishment was still very much a thing, so, you know, you got slapped for any number of things. I don't specifically recall getting slapped for speaking Singlish in a way that I hear stories from people who spoke Irish and had that same kind of experience. But what you would get is if you'd use a word or phrase that smelled a little too much like Singlish, you would get bad marks on your English assignment or test, and then maybe you'd get punished, physically or otherwise. And then you get bad marks and you go home and then get punished again. And so it was just reinforced in school and at home.

HZ: I read a statement from the chair of Speak Good English Movement thing from 2005 who said the aim wasn't to eradicate Singlish, and I was like, “Well, what is the aim then? Just to demonize it so much that people eradicate it for you?”

BIBEK GURUNG: Yeah! That's how it always felt.
I think it's about class politics and, and trying to find ways to leverage yourself into a higher or a more lucrative space to exist in. and then you just repeat that experiment for decades, and that's that's the landscape you end up with.
I was actually very surprised - I did go to a polytechnic where I studied communications for a bit, we were putting on this talk show in the campus studio, and it was about speaking good English. And the vibe or the general bent in the production team, which is us students, was: “Speak Good English is a good campaign, so we should get experts to defend this.” This was way before my sort of linguistic awakening, I suppose. And we had someone who was adjacent to the Speak Good English campaign in government, a school teacher who taught in secondary schools, and a drama and speech teacher.
And the first two guests were pretty much following the party line of, “We have to speak good English because we have to be understood throughout the world. We're such a small country of 5 million. How can we have a language that only exists within us? We need to be able to talk to everybody else, because we want to be a global city able to be understood by everyone” - again with the assumption that English is understood and accessible to everyone, which is a different topic.
And the speech and drama teacher who was the third guest actually blew my mind and maybe kind of put me on this awakening path towards social linguistics, with this: if you're understood and you can communicate with the people around you, why does it matter if you say scared of the dark or afraid of the dark or whatever nonsense fake distinctions? And it was so surprising to hear someone whose job was to teach people how to speak effectively actually raise their hand and say, “Guys, I don't think Singlish is that bad. I think it's fine.”

HZ: Also, people are quite good at code switching. It's not like how you speak at home is how you would speak if you were doing some kind of international trade. I don't know how real jobs work.

BIBEK GURUNG: You're so lucky.

HZ: It's so strange to me to see one of the reasons cited being the idea that Singlish would be contaminating the officially sanctioned version of English, not only because people are well capable of code switching, but also I wonder how they thought it would do that. People often act like English is this fragile entity rather than this unstoppable, like, cockroach of a language that just goes everywhere and then refuses to leave. It's incredibly resilient, it's not fragile at all, it's not pure in itself, and because it is a global, colonizing language, there's uncountable versions of it. Like, it's absurd.

BIBEK GURUNG: That’s such a great point. And I think it also goes to this sense of colonial self-cringe that still sticks around where the government - or whoever the government happens to be at the time, whether it's the current party that's been in power forever or the British administration - their lack of faith in their subjects in being able to keep up, that they'd not be able to tell the difference, or they'd not be able to code switch and not know what's the correct variety and what's the this sort of spoiled version, right?
And also code switching wasn't even a thing that we were saying until… I remember that phrase code switching being used in the context of Singapore as switching languages entirely, so someone who is able to speak English in the office goes home and speaks Malay, and then can speak Tamil to his friends, for instance. Now, I'm saying this in the context of Singlish not being recognized as its own language. But the idea of being able to code switch dialect wasn't even a thing that we were aware of.

HZ: In Singapore, school-aged children are taught two languages: all of them have to learn English, and most classes are conducted in English; then they also learn a second language, their so-called ‘Mother Tongue’, which is either Malay, Mandarin or Tamil.

BIBEK GURUNG: So what happens is: most people in Singapore are assigned to four races and 'other' in the official records. And if you're assigned Chinese and you go into a public school in Singapore - which, most people go into a public school - if you are going through schooling in a public school and you're Chinese you have to learn Mandarin. And it doesn't matter if you're Teochew it doesn't matter if you're Hakka or any number of language heritages that have really not much to do with Mandarin, you have to learn that. And if you happen to be Indian, you will have to learn Tamil unless you can make a strong case, or you happen to live in a neighborhood or community that teaches Punjabi or Bengali or whatever, like another different Indian language.

HZ: Note: not all the schools have classes in those other languages.

BIBEK GURUNG: So even within these different language schooling policies, there's still efforts to flatten things out. And the Speak Good Mandarin campaign is a strong counterpart to the Speak Good English campaign, which is the idea that people in Singapore are not speaking Teochew or Hakka or Hokkien or whatever; they're just speaking bad Chinese, and by Chinese, that's Mandarin. This is a wider issue with Chinese languages where anything outside of Chinese is spoken, Mandarin is referred to as dialect implying that it's not a real language, it's just an offshoot of the proper one, which is Mandarin. I suppose you have the similar dynamic with Italian and the various Italian languages all being called dialetti, which is not fair.

HZ: It's so fraught.

BIBEK GURUNG: It's so fraught.

HZ: What's the benefit of this distinction?

BIBEK GURUNG: Yeah, exactly.

HZ: And who is benefiting from this distinction?

BIBEK GURUNG: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, there's this effort to flatten out the diversity of different Chinese languages that exist in Singapore because of the same argument which is China is our biggest trade partner and we should be able to communicate with them which sort of ignores the fact that in China they speak different languages. There's Cantonese, there's Hakka, there's Fujianese and, you know, all of this happening. So yeah, this is the same sort of misguided language philosophy undergirding everything.

HZ: Did you ever feel like there was any cachet to speaking Singlish because it had this forbidden quality and because it had some rich swears?

BIBEK GURUNG: I really wish that there was something rebellious or edgy about speaking Singlish when I was growing up, but there really wasn't, because it wasn't framed as this is a different variety that you should stay away from. It was just sort of framed as: this is the wrong way of doing a thing that you're trying to do, as in speak English. Obviously you would have slang terms and trendy ways of saying things that are popular and would be a part of the Singlish ecosystem. But as a whole, there wasn't anything cool about it.

HZ: That’s what they want you to think!

BIBEK GURUNG: And we fell for it!
The name Singlish I've always felt is not helpful, at least not yet. It makes it sound like it is sort of a joke, or it sounds a bit silly, as if it's not a very serious thing. There is also a another language called Manglish, which is spoken across the strait in Malaysia, and it's basically identical. And I've always thought about what if we had another word to sort of encompass this whole continuum together into one thing.

HZ: I wonder if anyone has ever tried to get one going, like a kind of independent word rather than a portmanteau, because I think most portmanteaus aren't taken that seriously - unless they're so old that people have stopped realising they're portmanteaus.

BIBEK GURUNG: I did have a misguided moment in my early linguistics career where I thought we should call this 'Straits Creole' as in from the Malacca Straits. I was trying to get that going for a little bit and then abandoned it because, honestly, I had better things to do. But yeah, I wonder if something like that would have been productive. But, yeah. It's, I think, attacking a symptom of an issue, rather than the issue, which is various forces causing a language to be oppressed.

HZ: Bibek Gurung is a former linguist and current comedy performer, he has a show next week, on 16 October 2024, find out about that and other upcoming shows by following Some Pulp Fiction on Instagram, and I’ll link to Bibek too at theallusionist.org/singlish.

Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…

opsimath, noun: poetic/literary: a person who begins to learn or study only late in life.

Honestly? Good for you, opsimaths. It’s cool that you found it.Try using ‘opsimath’ in an email today.

This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. The music is by Martin Austwick of PaleBirdMusic.com and the podcasts Neutrino Watch and Song By Song.

Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show - maybe you’ve got products you want to sell for the Winterval season? - or any of the other shows in the Multitude stable, get in touch with them at multitude.productions/ads.

And you can hear or read every episode, get links to all the guests you heard from and more information about the topics, donate to support the show and become a member of the Allusioverse with all the perks that entails, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and links to the events that are coming up like the Vancouver meetup and the special 10th birthday live show - all your allusionist information and news and most importantly podcasts live at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.