10 to 15 minute read
I’ve always been insecure about the way I speak. Even though English was technically my first language and native tongue, and despite how decently well I performed in any English language examination they tossed at me in school, I never felt fully comfortable with using it solely because of my accent.
What accent is it, you might be wondering with raised eyebrows?
Anti-climatically, it’s just your typical Singaporean accent coupled with a few more mispronunciation errors than usual. This begs the question: why was I so uncomfortable with it? Perhaps by answering this, I can show you how to be less self-conscious and embrace our own identities.
At this point, it’s important to acknowledge the difference between a Singaporean accent and Singlish. While the former is an accent, Singlish is a more complicated phenomenon. There is much debate as to what Singlish actually is: some argue it is a “creole” (Goh, 1999; Hsieh et al, 2022) or even another language altogether (Tan, 2019). Furthermore, as a linguistic phenomenon, Singlish can be classified as a “basilect” under the post-creole continuum or the “low” variety of English spoken in Singapore (Leimgruber, 2012). But for the purposes of this article, we’ll define Singlish as the colloquial form of Singaporean English used in daily life, as opposed to the formal Singaporean English with grammatical features similar to British English.
It is also necessary to acknowledge that I am approaching this from the point of view of a Chinese Singaporean university student. Compared to students from other ethnicities , my Singlish might be more influenced by Hokkien. Therefore, while the definition of Singlish as the colloquial form of Singaporean English is very much an oversimplification, it is suitable for the purposes of this article – which is to discuss the insecurity people feel when speaking in a Singaporean accent or Singlish.
Just as I was uncomfortable with my own accent, I wonder if some of you feel the same? Especially when talking to someone with a “perfect” English accent. There’s a term for this – linguistic insecurity. Although it may seem self-explanatory, as with many academic terms, it has been defined and redefined in a variety of ways. In this article, I’ll examine Singaporeans’ linguistic insecurity towards Singlish and their Singaporean-accented English through two of its definitions I find most pertinent derived from Foo and Tan (2018)’s review of the concept. First, as Labov (2006, p.318) characterises it: linguistic insecurity manifests in speakers who “adopt a standard of correctness which is imposed from without, and from beyond the group which helped form their native speech pattern”. And, second, as Meyerhoff (2011, p.181) puts it: such insecurity refers to the “speakers’ feeling that the variety they use is somehow inferior, ugly or bad”.
Neither my parents nor grandparents spoke English as their first language. As such , I feel that my “native speech pattern”, with its sometimes swallowed vowels and enunciation, is already not exactly the same as what is presented to my family as “proper” English. It is often seasoned with Singlish or has a distinct Singaporean accent peppered with supposed mispronunciation. First, let’s focus on the linguistic insecurity present regarding Singlish. For much of the early 2000s, the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM), which focused its efforts on its titular goal, framed Singlish and English as a zero-sum game. It presented Singlish as an example of “bad” English to be corrected. As Labov (2006, p. 318)’s explanation of linguistic insecurity provides, a “standard of correctness” was imposed from beyond the group – a language policy imposed top-down from the educated Singaporean government on the seemingly less-educated and at the time, less English-proficient Singaporean public.
In his 1999 National Day Rally (NDR) speech that preceded the establishment of the SGEM in April of the following year, then-Prime Minister Goh (1999) Chok Tong suggested that “If they [Singaporean pupils] get into the habit of speaking Singlish, then later they will either have to unlearn these habits, or learn proper English on top of Singlish. Many pupils will find this too difficult.” Although this concern was understandable, many Singaporeans today have demonstrated how speaking Singlish need not always come at the expense of speaking “proper English”. Today, many Singaporeans have learnt how to code-switch, whereby we use “proper” English in presentations and Singlish with friends, and then something in-between perhaps, when talking to teachers.
But, what was done was done. Although the SGEM had softened its message by the time of my adolescence, whereby they promoted English not to replace Singlish but to coexist with it, my (our) linguistic insecurity seemingly still exists. Here comes in Meyerhoff (2011, p.181)’s definition of linguistic insecurity, that the speakers feel “the variety they use is somehow inferior, ugly or bad”. On a personal level, I remember receiving SGEM-related stickers as freebies at school or at a carnival organised by my local grassroots committee. As children, we’re easily influenced, easily socialised into beliefs and norms which we would deems as our “common sense” and “normal”. I would know because those stickers are still on the walls of my room to this day.
Do you know how hard it is to peel off a ten-year-old sticker melted in this heat, let alone multiple of them?
On a societal level, Cavallero (2014)’s study shows how Singaporeans often rate Singapore Standard English (SSE) speakers higher on status-related traits such as ambitiousness, intelligence, confidence and being hardworking as compared to Singlish speakers. Speaking Singlish thus accords lower social prestige as compared to SSE.
At this point you might be wondering: with all this yapping about Singlish, what about the factors that promote linguistic insecurity towards Singaporean-accented English then? Gupta (2010) writes that it is accepted that there are no major grammatical differences between regional variants of Standard English. As such, the English promoted by the SGEM in writing could just as easily be the same English used in countries like Britain, the United States or Australia. I bring up these countries because these are the countries that were brought up in then-Prime Minister Goh (1999)’s NDR speech and implied as having favourable accents.
This is linked to our economic strategy of focusing on foreign investment, traditionally from the United States and Europe (Rumbaugh, 1995). Even before the SGEM, at the establishment of Singapore’s language policy just after independence, a “standard of correctness” was already imposed on us. Wee (2018) writes that in order to meet the standards of investors and multinational corporations, a strong focus on English learning was emphasised by Singapore’s language policy. Thus, even in my parents’ generation, the Western standard of English was seen as the best and most “proper” version of English spoken in Singapore.
So parroting the government messaging, younger me took pride in using “proper” English, faking accents from Western countries as a kid because I thought it was “posh”. It’s not as if my parents or grandparents could tell me otherwise. The truth was, I struggled with pronouncing words in the “right” way. While in lieu of my parents, I was exposed to a wide vocabulary of words through online video media, not every word I had read would be used often enough where I could pick up the pronunciation as the British or Americans would do it. Since the “proper” English upheld by SGEM and used at those formal settings was based on British English, this led to my second problem: the fact that even Singaporean-accented Standard English did not sound “good” enough to my judgemental ears. For a long time, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was speaking a “wrong” version of English.
It was only after I entered university that my views changed.I took an Ideas and Exposition Module under the University Town College Program called “What is a nation? Texts, images and national identity”. In it, as part of my attempts to answer that burning question. of why I was so uncomfortable with my own English, I explored the history and framing of Singlish. Although much of what I found had already been detailed above, delving into the research inspired by my seminar also made me realise that there was no one “proper” way to speak English. In fact, there were many versions of English – “World Englishes” (Kachru, 1997) which were localised in their own ways. And, there was, as should have been obvious enough, no single standard accent for English (Gupta, 2010).
The Singaporean accent is thus as acceptable as any other accent as long as we allow it to be. In fact, just like many accents, it often serves as an assertion of one’s (national) identity. There’s an intimacy that comes with using the Singaporean accent and Singlish, even in just our nearby neighbouring country of Malaysia. Once, when I was in Kuala Lumpur, just as my family boarded the small hotel-offered shuttle bus to the nearby mall, we encountered a couple that spoke in a familiar accent. Instantly, my father asked “Are you from Singapore?” To which they responded with a nod and a short but sweet conversation about our holiday trips ensued. If not for that accent, we would not have identified each other.
More personally, I think about how I first picked up Singlish to begin with. Looking back, it was in order to obtain a shared sense of identity with, as Benedict Anderson (1983) would put it, an “imagined community”. Sometime between the ages of eight and ten, I remember consciously noticing how my friends were using “lahs” and “lehs” at the end of their sentences. At the time, my father, the only other fluent English speaker in my household, had tried his best to speak the “proper” English as promoted by the government, and my only other encounter with English was through my copious consumption of books and interactions in the classroom. So, to me, I thought that those Singlish inflections were not “proper” English. But, I still adopted them anyway, to fit in. Reflecting on my past, I realised this pressure to belong was all self-imposed.
Thus, the answer to why am I so uncomfortable using English is this: Despite knowing better, I place pressure on myself based on the beliefs I’ve internalised from society. This is the recurring conflict in my life, One that I’ve become more aware of and want to break free from.
Over the course of the last year, I’ve become acquainted with many exchangers who spoke their variously accented English which I admired. If they could put themselves out here, speaking their first, second or even third language regardless of differences in accents, why couldn’t I? So, as with many things, I try. In so far as the situation is appropriate, and mostly in daily life, I season my Singaporean-accented English with Singlish. It makes life more exciting – after all, the way I speak is uniquely me, it reflects my family background and my twists and turns in coming to terms with my own English. Insecurities are as such: I think they make us all unique. Just as I shouldn’t be ashamed of the way I speak, the insecurities we all fear are nothing in the face of self-acceptance.
Banner and Cover images from Unsplash
About the Author:
Fiona is a second-year student majoring in Sociology who is trying her best to stay afloat. When not overdosing on copious amounts of caffeine, you might catch her playing tabletop games or tearing her hair out over her assignments.
References:
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