New Englishes: Writing Singlish in Singaporean Anglophone Poetry

This post has been contributed by Jerome Lim.

An image explaining the different usage of multiple Singlish discourse particles. Chan Kai Chern. Web. 10 February 2016. <http://poachedmag.com/2014/01/16/singlish-ok-what-why-cannot-speak-leh/>.

This blog post aims to give a general introduction of Singlish as a New English, and highlight some interesting examples of poetry in Singlish. A good overview of the use of Singlish written by Tessa Wong can be found here.

1. New Englishes

The term ‘New Englishes’ (or World Englishes) refers to creolic variants of English spoken in former non-settler British colonies. Generally, these can be split into four geographical groups: the Straits Settlements, India and Ceylon, Anglophone Caribbean and East/West Africa. John Platt et al., in their groundbreaking work The New Englishes (1984), propose that a ‘New English’ “has become ‘localised’ or ‘nativised’ by adopting some language features of its own, such as sounds, intonation patterns, sentence structures, words and expressions.” (Platt et al. 3) We will look at one particular instance of ‘New English’ in this article—Singlish.