English or Singlish - Assignment Example

Nevertheless, he tends to speak in Singlish with other Singaporean. Singlish does a language comprise words originating from English, Mandarin, Malay and Hokkien (a Chinese dialect). Singaporeans usually avoid speaking in Singlish when they are with foreigners. They feel that Singlish is not a proper language. Anyhow, Singlish is a by-product of the Singaporean national policies of race integration. Singapore suffered from a racist riot in the 1960s which resulting the government to take action to bring all the races together and standardized English as work language.

In his twenties, Koh is born after the riot and is greatly influenced by this policy. Thus, Singlish became a media for interaction.The first unique point is the reduplication (Tan 169) in words can be observed. A classic would be the "pray pray". Chinese language users would duplicate the word in order to emphasize its meaning. The phrase is simply a loan phrase with equivalent translation from the Hokkien language which sounds like this: meaning "don't fool around". Meanwhile, "later" this term, it indicates in the near future.

Note that in Singlish, a lot of discourse particles for example "la", "lar", "meh", "ka", etc are used. These particles do not have specific meanings. They are added to make the sentence more expressive. For example "meh" is usually added behind a sentence to show questioning. Besides these particles, it is observed that the article "the", "a" and "an" are usually omitted in some sentences such as "result send to home address one" where "The" in front of "result" was not there as Chinese Language user do not use articles in their language (Tan 158).

Meantime, the phrase in Koh's conversation "She si be kiasu" is another notable clue of codeswitching. "Kiasu" is a direct loanword from Hokkien language which describes someone who is afraid of failure or losing (Wikipedia: Kiasu). Meanwhile means "very". In the 1990s, Singaporeans have portrait themselves as "Kiasu". This spirit also applies in workplace competition, examination, comparing wealth and also talent. It is a way of a small country like Singapore's life to keep up with the global competition.