Singapore is a multilingual and multiracial country, with residents hailing from all walks of life.
It’s then no wonder the nation has developed its distinct brand of English, which has been recognised by many worldwide.
Interestingly, one Nigerian TikTok content creator went viral last year for insisting that the Nigerian and Singaporean accents are “literally the same”.
Safe to say, Singaporeans can almost always spot their countrymen overseas just by the way they speak — but what is it that makes our accent sound so unique?
And could we have possibly adopted the accent from our neighbours across the Indian Ocean?
Dr Nick Huang, an assistant professor at the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at National University of Singapore (NUS) spoke to MS News on the topic.
Unlike the standard English language, Singapore English — as referred to by linguists — has its own unique grammatical structure and pronunciation.
It is said to be influenced by the Malay language, and Chinese and Indian dialects such as Hokkien and Tamil.
“The general idea is that properties of these Asian languages got ‘transferred over’ to Singapore English,” said Dr Huang.
The origin of Singapore English dates back to the country’s colonial history when English was a “minority language”.
Source: The British Empire
At the time, most of Singapore’s residents were not native English speakers.
They had to learn and speak the English language when it became important in their work and daily lives.
Over the years, more Singaporeans have adopted English as their primary language.
Today, nearly 50 per cent of Singaporeans use English to communicate at home.
Meanwhile, many young Singaporeans are still learning to speak a secondary language, be it Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil.
Source: Medium
The Singapore accent had also likely developed over time as a shared way of speaking. Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at NTU, Luke Lu says:
The more people within a community interact with one another… the more they will converge on common ways of speaking.
As such, the Singapore accent is unique to Singapore “because it is something that emerged from the way Singaporeans and our diverse language backgrounds interacted”.
The Singapore English accent, therefore, simply mirrors the nation’s multilingual populace.
“An accent simply refers to the pronunciation features of a speaker, including tonality, rhythm, stress etc.” said Mr Lu.
He added that it had nothing to do with vocabulary and how good a person is at the language.
According to Dr Huang, there are several linguistic properties that make the Singapore English accent “highly distinctive”.
Singapore English speakers, in particular, have a dress-trap merger, which simply means that we pronounce certain words with different vowels the same way.
For example, ask most Singapore English speakers to say the words “bet” and “bat” and they will sound practically identical.
We also have a habit of dropping our “final consonants clusters” — meaning that we pronounce words like “lists” as “lis”.
In terms of tone, recent research suggests that Singapore English speakers start multi-syllable words with a low pitch and end high.
As a native speaker of Singapore English himself, Dr Huang also shared that he is always “surprised” by how quickly he can pick out the common Singaporean accent, particularly when he is overseas.
One surefire way to pick out a Singaporean with your eyes closed is also to listen to whether they use Singlish — an informal variation of Singapore English that is almost like a special secret code for insiders.
Despite English being taught at an academic level, many Singaporeans still use Singlish in their day-to-day conversations.
These include the famed “lah”, “leh”, and “lor”, alongside a whole dictionary of words and phrases that may sound absurd to those not familiar.
Source: TheSmartLocal
For example, the phrase “spoil market” is in English but will not make much sense to the standard English speaker.
Those familiar with Singlish, however, will understand this as a term for overachieving. Someone who has “spoil market” is a person who has raised the bar so high, that no one else can compete.
Singlish took off in the 1990s after being featured in local television and movie productions such as ‘Phua Chu Kang’ and ‘I Not Stupid’.
Phua Chu Kang’s trendy catchphrases featuring mispronounced words were such a hit among Singaporeans that they became a “cause for concern” among educators and the Government.
Former Prime Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong was one of the public figures who openly discouraged the use of Singlish.
In a speech at the Marine Parade National Day dinner in 1999, Mr Goh touched on the importance of speaking standard English and claimed that Singlish is “English corrupted by Singaporeans”.
Source: Petir
Despite noting that there was nothing wrong with our accent, he shared that using Singlish can create problems in communication between individuals from other countries.
“Singlish is broken, ungrammatical English sprinkled with words and phrases from local dialects and Malay which English speakers outside Singapore have difficulties in understanding,” Mr Goh said.
He discouraged the use of Singlish amongst the younger generation, and proposed the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM), which was launched nationwide in 2000 to encourage all Singaporeans to speak grammatically correct English that is understood on a universal level.
However, in recent times, Singlish is increasingly viewed as an essential part of local culture and heritage.
There is a growing movement “that views Singlish as a unique symbol of Singapore’s linguistic diversity, racial diversity, and national identity“, said policy explainer site Maju.
Today, the Singaporean accent is not only understood but acknowledged even 10,542 kilometres away, surprisingly, in Nigeria.
In 2023, the Singaporean accent made its way to African TikTok when a Nigerian content creator stitched together short clips of Singaporeans speaking.
@onyinyechi.iWho is the original owner of this accent💀♬ original sound – Vee
“Do you guys know that Nigerians and Singaporeans have literally the same accents?” she asked.
The TikTok video of this observation has been shared over 40,000 times, with multiple users echoing the sentiment.
Mr Lu, however, told MS News that any similarity between the two accents would be “completely coincidental”.
It may also be a result of “similar linguistic processes” to make speaking more efficient.
“For example, consonant cluster simplification is a common process in many vernaculars around the world that drops one consonant in a series of adjacent consonants,” he said.
“In Singlish, this might involve dropping the /t/ or /d/ sound at the end of words indicating past tense.”
This could explain why instead of saying “I looked at him”, Singapore English (and perhaps Nigerian English) speakers may say “I look at him”.
It may not be grammatically correct, but it is a little shorter.
Through their accents and even Singlish, Singaporeans have a way of speaking that sets them apart from communities around the world.
However, many residents sometimes feel the need to code switch to sound “smarter”, said Mr Lu.
Compared to American and British accents, the Singaporean accent is still less recognised and therefore less valued.
“Personally, I think it’s a shame that some Singaporeans might feel inferior about the way they speak. It’s not necessarily an issue of intelligibility, but more an issue of ideology,” he shared.
This inferiority might have been caused by discourses in the media and state-produced messages.
These include the SGEM campaign and the way Singapore-based broadcasters speak.
“The day CNA (Channel NewsAsia) broadcasters speak in a Singaporean accent, would be the day that Singaporeans are secure about the way we speak,” said Mr Lu.
Also read: Opinion: S’poreans should be more open about S’porean identity
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Featured image by MS News and courtesy of Muhamad Iqbal Akbar on Unsplash.
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