by Moses Tan
Edited by Priyanka V
Published 10 Nov 2006
Web Exclusive
Accents are a curious phenomenon. Even within a single language, variations in which a word can be pronounced are so different that they may come out sounding like an alien tongue altogether. Think of an English Cockney cab driver and a Singaporean hawker. Both speak basically the same language. But the odds are that if one attempted to converse with the other, sign language might prove to be more effective than their supposedly common language.
In fact, examples need not be gotten from far off lands. Simply look right here in our hostel (some might call it home) where accents are already so diverse due to the melting pot demographics of our beloved Singapore. Coupled with the fact that a myriad of foreign students and scholars from countries as far flung as India and China study here adds to the diversity.
Traditionally, the Singaporean stereotypical accents can be categorised into several pigeonholes- the Singlish accent, the accent-less “educated-Singaporean” accent, and the “Matt” (Malay) accent. Curiously the Gen-X Singaporean Indians either have a very slight accent or almost no noticeably unique accent. Perhaps this is because they have found favour with the laisser-faire Singlish intonation which is oh-so-pleasurable to the tongue. Our government possibly takes pride in this fact as evidence of their incredibly successful racial integration policy during the late 1960s.
Ostensibly the Chinese scholars from the P.R.C have the most interesting accent. They speak with a vibrant lilt that keeps ones’ ears begging for more after each break in conversation. Presumably, this endearing accent is carried over from their native tongue which also boasts of a broad vernacular that demands for verbal gymnastics in their enunciation. The Indian scholars from India have the most distinctive accent of all. Their pronunciations allow inference of their extremely agile tongues and through their speed of speech of their evidently agile mind as well.
And thus with the aforesaid introduction, I would like to delve into my true purpose for this exposition. It is to take up my pet peeve of stigmatising home grown Singaporeans who use fake English accents in order to sound upper crust. This pretentious behaviour is annoying to just about everyone they interact with. Incredibly, these persons have either escaped condemnation throughout their twelve or more years of education in local schools or they have grown accustomed to the criticisms. More plausibly perhaps is that they are still delusional in their belief that their false accent is “cool”.
It is necessary to explore the psychology of these poseurs to understand why they adopt such a ridiculous persona. Thus this author has spent time in front of a mirror practising enunciation with a thick British accent, copied mostly from Austin Power movie dialogue. I then re-watched Golden Eye and The Philosopher’s Stone and I must say that it was oddly fun to play the International Man of Mystery, Double-O-Seven and Harry Potter in front of the mirror. But at the end of it, I stared at my jet black Asian hair and small squinty eyes and realised that my home grown accent still fitted me best. It would be foolish and unbecoming to wish to be of a different ethnicity. I concluded that these people must have started play-acting British persons and have forgotten to stop. Either that or they are simply bloody dotty in their minds.
Could it be that many of them had actually lived abroad when they were young and picked up their linguistic peculiarity there? But does a person’s accent solidify at a certain age? Does a person who had lived his first ten years in Ulster and speaks Irish-type English change his accent naturally upon resettling in Singapore? Does the number of years spent in whichever country matter? What happens if he had spent ten years in Ireland but the next twenty in Singapore? Being a true blue Singaporean, born and bred entirely locally (notwithstanding vacations abroad), I am wholly incapable of answering these questions. Of course this special class of accented Singaporeans are forgivable; but what about that class of persons who are as true blue Singaporean as I am but strangely still speak Brit English?
Obviously there is in truth nothing to forgive. Even if there was, I would not presume to be the one to give it. But perhaps it is because nobody had ever been presumptuous enough to undertake the forgiving hence the poor poseurs have no one to turn to, to seek forgiveness from, to re-enter into the fold of normalcy. They are possibly too embarrassed to cease their false persona, having carried on with their lie for so long. And so having recognised this need for an arbitrary forgiver, I humbly offer myself as such; to give re-entry into the fold of normalcy for these poor linguistic heathens. Come! Seek forgiveness for your linguistic deformity. Return and repent!
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Personally, I feel that its too simple to judge the merit of accents just because some people can’t pull off an accent really well. Here’s the balance on the other side. Now, the thing is to be well-understood and persuasive, one has to speak well. Naturally, that comes with an accent-neutral speaking voice, instead of the colloquial Singlish. So if to be better understood by an international audience, its only rational to move towards RP or the “newscaster” Midwestern US style of speaking.
Furthermore, a good command of proper pronunciation and enunciation is a signal of intelligence, capability and education. Stephen Colbert who hosts the Colbert Report said that even though he grew up in the deep South said he started to adopt the Midwestern US accent because he didn’t want to be stereotyped as a dumb southerner because of the way he speaks. In fact, Wikipedia, if it can be cited at all says, “Many Britons abroad modify their accent to make their pronunciation closer to Received Pronunciation, in order to be better understood than if they were using their usual accent.” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
TV Hosts, Radio DJs, VJs, and emcees get theirs job not because they speak heavy Singlish or any sort of colloquial forms of English. Its because they have an international (or even American) accent which appeals to the broadest segment of population possible. While it might appeal to a certain class of people, colloquial English is highly exclusive in demography when used in public broadcast.
That almost implies that there is a standard that we ought to adhere to, and almost leads to the conclusion that language ought never to change when in actual fact it does. Language does change, but Singlish is not the changing of a language; its a colloquial form of a language that bends the accepted standard grammatical forms and sentence structure of an originating language (English) due to influence from other languages of the speakers, (Hokkien and Mandarin, with borrowed Malay words but not Malay sentence structure).
Furthermore, there is a standard of English (or any language in particular) that we ought to adhere to or else we run the risk of creating a new language. Already some of my exchange student friends are complaining that they don’t understand heavy Singlish accents. It does not follow that we can have grammatical rules and sentence structure rules in English grammar, but no pronuncation and enunciation rules.
Then why not Singapore Standard English? Well, that’s a bit better but personally not all that much. If I could cite Russell Peters and his sketch on the Indian accent being a very unsexy and a turn-off accent… I feel that’s its the same way. To say that the Singapore Standard English is accentless is a false assertion too. It is an accent, except that practitioners of a certain accent usually never realise that they have an accent. People who speak RP naturally would also claim that they are accentless, and even more right to such a claim because it is (or at least, was) the international norm for English.
But otherwise if the person is not pulling off an accent well and is adopting a wholly ridiculous accent like the Irish English, or the Jamaican one, then there is some basis to criticise him or her, that would entirely be a hypocritical. However, I beg that we give the benefit of the doubt to those who want to learn to codeswitch and be understood better in English, and speak in proper full sentences with correct grammar. Somehow I find it ironic that in the end of the article you begin to use big English words and assume an air of superiority i.e. “to give re-entry into the fold of normalcy for these poor linguistic heathens. Come! Seek forgiveness for your linguistic deformity” while Singlish or Singaporean Standard English is the language of the people, the unassuming masses.
Singlish is a register, a dialect, and a creole. It does not bend the rules of grammar – it creates its own grammar from the languages around it.
Would you say, “Those French and Spanish people! They should speak Latin, to be most understood!”
After all, using your logic, French and Spanish are “colloquial versions” of Latin.
There is a fable – in the effort to please everybody – you please no one. Most New York rappers use an extensive argot that cannot be initially understood, but have a cult-following, and people learn it eventually. Then there is the “sold-out-to-the-mainstream” rap (think “Smack That”) like the one you hear on the radio – in their efforts to cater to everybody, their artistic value drops.
SSE is a Singaporean government propaganda creation. The Putains au Pouvoir (that’s French or “People in Power”, or PAP for you) have never spoken Singlish in their life, and thus cannot appreciate it. When they created the “SAR-vivor rap” (SARS is the virus, that I just want to minus, anyone?), they showed their ignorance of the philosophy of Singlish with their stupide rhyme that went “some say leh, some say lah”, completely ignoring the concept of what those grammatical partices meant. (It’s like saying “some say these, some say those” – means absolutely nothing!)
I have an American accent because I lived in the US for five years during my childhood and went to their elementary school. Once in primary school, a girl mistook my accent as artificial … although mortified and self-conscious of it from then on, most people seemed to tell the difference between a “fake accent” and my genuine one. Yet, I never lost (the ability to) speak fluent Singlish that I gained in the first five years of my life either. I can code-switch between one and the other. And in the years that I returned to Singapore, I picked up British influences (a lot in spelling). An accent is easy to acquire if you live in an area long enough, as long as you can grep the philosophy. It’s easier for children to do this because they are less assuming about the concepts of language and have a more sensitive perception of phonology. Some people like Chinese immigrant cooks who have lived in the US for 40 years for instance, never lose their accent because I think the suprasegmental aspects – toning and stress-syllable-timing – are the hardest parts to pick up while the most easiest elements of accent to detect.
Anyhow, Singlish is not merely the “language of the masses”. There are so many misconceptions about language that people seem to take on. People criticise the use of Singlish with a most supercilious attitude, thinking themselves to be above the ignorance of the masses, but in fact, ironically, they are the ignorant ones, making several fallacies in the fields of sociolinguistics and morphology.