VARIETIES OF ENGLISH

I. INTRODUCTION
• People often talk about English as a global language or
lingua franca. With more than 350 million people around
the world speaking English as a first language and more
than 430 million speaking it as a second language, there
are English speakers in most countries around the world
• The English language spoken in Singapore is called
“Singapore English” or “ Singlish”
What makes Singlish different from
British English?
 We’re going to focus on 2 parts

A. Pronunciation
B. Grammars
 A. Pronunciation
1) The Singaporeans often reduce the use of
stresses in their speech. English is a language
that makes frequent use of stresses, or
stressing certain syllables in sentences and
words more than others. Singlish is more
homogenous with its syllables
For example: Instead of saying "I LIKE this a LOT," you'd speak
each syllable with more or less the same amount of emphasis, just
like "I like this a lot."
 A. Pronunciation
2) The Singaporeans reduce their use of voiced
consonants. Voiced consonants include "g", "p",
"th," "ch", and "v". Singlish pronunciation is
more relaxed and less strong. Words like "pat"
are pronounced like "bat," because the strength
behind the consonant "p" is lost.
For example: "Birth" becomes "biff"
and "with" becomes "wiff"
And so on…
 B. Grammars
1) A common way of asking yes or no questions
in Singlish is to phrase the question as a
statement and then add the Cantonese-derived
word "meh". They always have a rising
inflection as they get to the end of the
sentence, just like the way questions are
inflected in English.
For example, "can you do that?" in Singlish would be
phrased as "you can do that meh?"
 B. Grammars
2)
They always lose prepositions, verb conjugations, and plural words.
Singlish takes a lot of its grammar from Malay, so it makes much less
use of prepositions, verb conjugations, and plural words.
Prepositions are words that describe the relationship between verbs
and nouns and nouns and nouns. Prepositions include words like
"before," "after," "in between," and "throughout." So the English
sentence "he sat in front of her" might be reduced to "he sat front
her" in Singlish.
Verb conjugations are the different forms of verbs for different uses,
like we go versus he goes. So instead of saying "he goes there
everyday," you'd say "he go there everyday."
The use of plural words is infrequent in Singlish. If you can get across
your meaning without uses the plural form of a noun, use the singular.
For example, "I ate grapes" would be
"I ate grape."
 B. Grammars
3) Use present tense mainly. Singlish doesn't
make a lot of use of past tense verbs, unlike
standard English
 For example: instead of saying "what happened
yesterday?" they'd say "what happen yesterday?" And
"you went where?" becomes "you go where?"