Singapore English (SgE, SE, en-SG) is the set of varieties of the English language native to Singapore. In Singapore, English is spoken in two main forms: Singapore Standard English, which is grammatically similar to British English, and Singapore Colloquial Englishbetter known as Singlishthe colloquial register of English spoken between Singaporeans. Many Singaporeans use a combination of both forms in daily speech, and may switch between forms where necessary.
Singapore is a cosmopolitan society. In 2020, nearly half of Singaporeans of Chinese descent reported English as their main language at home, while only a third spoke Mandarin. The remaining spoke various varieties of Chinese such as Hokkien, Cantonese or Teochew. Most Singaporeans of Indian descent speak either English or a South Asian language. Many Malay Singaporeans use Malay as the lingua franca among the ethnic groups of the Malay world, while Eurasians and other mixed-race Singaporeans are usually monolingual in English.
English is the medium of communication among students from preschool to university in Singapore. Many families use two or three languages on a regular basis, and English is often one of them. The level of fluency in English among residents in Singapore also varies greatly from person to person, depending on their educational background, but English in general is nevertheless understood, spoken and written as the main language throughout the country.
Singapore English can be classified into Singapore Standard English (SSE) and Singapore Colloquial English (Singlish). The language consists of three sociolects: acrolect, mesolect, and basilect. Standard Singapore English is regarded as both the acrolect and mesolect, while Singlish is regarded as the basilect.
Singaporeans vary their language according to social situations (Pakir 1991) and attitudes that they want to convey (Poedjosoedarmo 1993). Better educated Singaporeans with a "higher" standard of English tend to speak "Standard" Singapore English (the acrolect), whereas those who are less-educated or whose first language is not English tend to speak Singlish (the basilect). Gupta (1994) said that most Singaporean speakers systematically alternate between colloquial and formal language depending on the formality of the situation.
Standard Singapore English, also called Singapore Standard English, is the standard form of English used in Singapore. It generally resembles British English and is often used in more formal settings such as the workplace or when communicating with people of higher authority such as teachers, bosses and government officials. Singapore English acts as the "bridge" among different ethnic groups in Singapore. Standard Singapore English retains British spelling and grammar.
The British established a trading post on the island of Singapore in 1819, and the population grew rapidly thereafter, attracting many immigrants from Chinese provinces and from India. The roots of Standard Singapore English derive from nearly a century and a half of British control. Its local character seems to have developed early in the English-medium schools of the 19th and early-20th centuries, where the teachers often came from India and Ceylon, as well as from various parts of Europe and from the United States of America. By 1900 Eurasians and other locals were employed as teachers. Apart from a period of Japanese occupation (1942âÂÂ1945), Singapore remained a British colony until 1963, when it joined the Malaysian federation, but this proved a short-lived alliance, largely due to ethnic rivalries. Since its expulsion from the Federation in 1965, Singapore has operated as an independent city-state. English served as the administrative language of the British colonial government, and when Singapore gained self-government in 1959 and independence in 1965, the Singaporean government decided to keep English as the main language to maximise economic prosperity. The use of English as the nation's first language serves to bridge the gap between the diverse ethnic groups in Singapore; English operates as the lingua franca of the nation. The use of English as a global language for commerce, technology and science has also helped to expedite Singapore's development and integration into the global economy. Public schools use English as the main language of instruction, although students are also required to receive part of their instruction in their mother tongue; placement in such courses is based on ethnicity and not without controversy. The standard Singaporean accent used to be officially RP. However, in recent decades, a standard Singaporean accent, quite independent of any external standard, including RP, started to emerge. A 2003 study by the National Institute of Education in Singapore suggests that a standard Singaporean pronunciation is emerging and is on the cusp of being standardised. Singaporean accents can be said to be largely non-rhotic.
In 2023, opposition leader Pritam Singh advocated for English proficiency testing for immigrants seeking Singaporean citizenship. Polling data of native-born Singaporeans show broad support for the proposal.
The wide use of Singlish led the government to launch the Speak Good English Movement in Singapore in 2000 in an attempt to replace Singlish with Standard English. This movement was made to show the need for Singaporeans to speak Standard English. Nowadays, all children in schools are being taught Standard English with one of the other official languages (Chinese, Malay, Tamil) being taught as a second language. In Singapore, English is a "working language" that serves the economy and development and is associated with the broader global community. Meanwhile, the rest are "mother tongues" that are associated with the country's culture. Speaking Standard English also helps Singaporeans communicate and express themselves in their everyday life. In 2014, the Singaporean government made an announcement entitled "Speak Good English Movement brings fun back to Grammar and good English", where the strategies that would be used to promote their program in the following years were explained. Specifically, the government would release a series of videos demystifying the difficulty and dullness of the grammatical rules of the English language. These videos provide a more humorous approach to learning basic grammar rules. Singaporeans will now be able to practise the grammatical rules in both written and spoken English thanks to a more interactive approach.
Although Standard Singapore English (SSE) is mainly influenced by British English and, recently, American English, there are other languages that also contribute to its use on a regular basis. The majority of Singaporeans speak more than one language, with many speaking three to four. Most Singaporean children are brought up bilingual. They are introduced to Malay, Chinese, Tamil, or Singapore Colloquial English (Singlish) as their native languages, depending on their families' ethnic backgrounds and/or socioeconomic status. They also acquire those languages from interacting with friends in school and other places. Naturally, the presence of other languages in Singapore has influenced Singapore English, something particularly apparent in Singlish.
Both Singapore English and Singapore colloquial English are used with multiple accents. Because Singaporeans speak different ethnic mother tongues, they exhibit ethnic-specific features in their speech such that their ethnicity can be readily identified from their speech alone. The strength of one's ethnic mother tongue-accented English accent depends on factors like formality and their language dominance. Words from Malay, Chinese, and Tamil are also borrowed, if not code-switched, into Singapore English. For example, the Malay words "" (to eat), "" (finished), and the Hokkien word "kiasu" () are constantly used, having been adopted into the lexicon, to the point that Singaporeans are not necessarily aware of which language those words are from. The nativisation process has progressed so far that the word "kiasu" has been used in the Singapore press since 2000 without being italicised, and went onto claim international recognition, being admitted to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2007.
Broadly speaking, Singaporean English accents are based on the sound systems of standard non-rhotic Southern British English accents, as is often the case with dialects of English spoken in Commonwealth nations aside from Canada. Like many of these dialects, the vowels in and are distinct in Singapore English, and the word plant is generally pronounced with the vowel , rather than the vowel .
As English becomes more often used as a day-to-day language in Singapore, mass adoption of local norms have led to the formation of a standard, Singaporean accent with characteristics primarily driven by conventions and language change within the country. Nowadays, the accents of many Singaporeans reflect a compromise between local characteristics and standard language given that English has been institutionalised in the country for decades. Accents still vary, depending on age, upbringing and the race or heritage language of the speaker.
Singapore English is predominantly non-rhotic, like Australian and Nigerian accents (and most postcolonial dialects of English), so most speakers will leave out the r sound in words like far. Though rare, studies suggest that final r sounds are more likely to be realised by younger speakers and women among Chinese and Indian Singaporeans, and that this tendency is more common in content words than in function words, and in reading than in conversation.
Rhoticity is generally uncommon, and if adopted, seldom consistent, even in environments where a linking r could occur, e.g., my brothe<u>r</u> is and my siste<u>r</u> is. In a 2018 study, r sounds were dropped at the end of syllables more than 90% of the time in conversational speech, while linking r was used less than 20% of the time. Cases of intrusive r (e.g., pronouncing drawing as draw-ring) were negligible.
As in most varieties of English, free vowels are shorter when there is a following final consonant (i.e., in closed syllables), so bee has a long vowel while beat has a relatively shorter one. The length of a vowel is determined by its environmental context, coda voiceless stop consonants are consistently associated with shortened vowel lengths, while coda fricatives like prompt longer vowel durations.
Th-stopping is common at the start of syllables, making tree and three potential homophones; similarly, then can be pronounced , in place of . This is generally more common in informal settings. Dental fricatives may undergo th-fronting at the end of words, so teeth sounds like teef, and breathe like breve. The word maths is an exception, given that is more commonly observed in this word. For some Tamil bilinguals, word-final th sounds are alternatively realised as stops.
Stop consonants in Singapore English are usually not released at the end of words, and voiceless stops can be aspirated or unaspirated in initial positionsâÂÂhow strongly a stop is aspirated can be determined by its place of articulation, the heritage or home language of the speaker and the level of formality of the conversation. In general, speakers with strong Malay or Tamil accents are less likely to aspirate initial stops, while Chinese Singaporeans are more predisposed to using aspiration.
Final may show some degree of glottal reinforcement, final are also prone to being completely replaced by a glottal stop in fast speech. The use of glottalisation is more common in Malay-accented English. While it is not conventional to weaken t and d into alveolar taps in words like little and ladder, doing so may convey a higher level of sociolinguistic prestige. T-flapping has nevertheless been reported at higher incidences in compound numbers (e.g., in for<u>t</u>y-five) and across word boundaries (e.g., ge<u>t</u> up).
Final "l" sounds, as in mai<u>l</u> and rai<u>l</u>way, are categorised into three principal realisations in Singapore English: vocalised, clear and dark "l"sâÂÂeach variant shows strong correlations with race, language proficiency, education and social class within the sociolinguistic landscape of Singapore.
Certain final consonant clusters tend to be reduced in conversational speech, so list drops its final and ask loses the , however speakers are seldom consistent in doing so. To give other examplesâÂÂthe clusters , as in environme<u>nt</u> and e<u>nd</u>, are both reduced to , while the sequences , as in ju<u>mp</u>, a<u>ct</u> and li<u>ft</u>, drop their rightmost consonants.
The sequence , as in o<u>ld</u>, is also commonly reduced to . Since those who vocalise their "l"s tend to drop them completely after mid central and back vowels, old may be further reduced to , with both the l and d dropped, e.g., old show becomes (see ). This does not apply to the past tense ending -ed.
The most common and predominant realisation of the r sound in Singapore English is the postalveolar approximant , roughly the same sound found in most native varieties of English worldwide. The alveolar tap or trill is an alternative realisation of r among Malay and Indian Singaporeans and older speakers in general. Among Tamil Singaporeans, the trilled variant appears to be extremely rare in comparison to the approximant and tapped r. A rare and emergent variant of r, indicative of R-labialisation and described as a labiodental approximant, has also been reported.
Some degree of final-obstruent devoicing has been reported to occur in Singapore English. Devoicing seldom takes place between vowels, so is it? maintains the. Newer studies dispute the idea that devoicing leads to ambiguity, and argue that underlying voicing is still recoverable from factors like the length of the consonant involved and the duration of the preceding vowel.
Conversely, there is an opposite tendency to voice coronal fricatives between vowels in some words like December â De'ember and pressure â pre[zh]ure, and even across word boundaries, so this is becomes thi is, though this tendency seems to be somewhat sporadic, with regard to which words are affected.
While words generally follow the pronunciation patterns of Southern British English accents, so figure is pronounced , and the words new, due and tune do not exhibit yod-dropping, there are several exceptionsâÂÂnotably, want and what are both pronounced with the open central vowel, like most varieties of North American English, instead of the rounded vowel that is predominant in Southern England and Australia.
Singapore English is characterised by a unique intonational system where pitch tends to be slightly raised at the end of a word with lexical stress. According to one analysis, the rightmost syllable of a stressed word or phonological word is marked with higher pitch, while words with no stress (e.g. my house) and unstressed initial syllables (e.g. again) carry relatively lower pitch. Meanwhile, all other non-final stressed syllables (e.g. writer) coincide with a mid level tone, or a similar pitch contour between low and high levels. There is also a tendency for pitch contours to be accentuated near the start of a sentence and diminished towards the end, and for pitch to drop or level out at the end of declarative sentences. For example, in the phrase I don't remember , pitch starts off low in I, then rises to a higher level in don't. The word remember is then realised with a less accentuated lowâÂÂmidâÂÂhigh pitch contour.
Tone assignment only takes place within the scope of the phonological word. Cranberry takes on a highâÂÂmidâÂÂhigh pitch contour , since cran and berry are analysed as separate words. Similarly, in brainstorm , brain and storm are both assigned high pitch. Prefixes with stress constitute their own phonological words, so the re in reenact is high-pitched. In words where the prefix is unstressed or less salient, like unfortunate and nonsense , the prefix is not treated as a separate unit with stress and is therefore not assigned high pitch.
One alternative analysis, that offers a more generalised description of the intonational system, posits that high pitch is associated with the right edge of an accentual phrase, and low pitch with the left edge; an accentual phrase may consist of a content word with zero or any number of preceding unstressed function words. For instance, in a sentence like I joined the call, in which I joined is analysed as a single accentual phrase, joined can be realised with rising pitch starting from the low pitch in I, in lieu of consistently high pitch. In this model, phonological words (e.g. cran and berry in cranberry) and prefixes with stress are analysed as belonging to separate accentual phrases. Other intonational variants have also been noted. For instance, flat pitch contours can sometimes span the entire length of words and accentual phrases where rising contours would normally be expected.
Wider pitch range is associated with the introduction of a topic near the start of a sentence. Elsewhere in the sentence, differences in pitch are less prominent, so low, mid and high tones may collapse into roughly the same pitch level. The end of a sentence is marked by a subtle drop or leveling out in pitch. YesâÂÂno questions are accompanied with rising pitch, as is the case in many other dialects of English. Rising pitch is also commonly used when there is non-final information at the end of an utterance, sometimes to indicate a non-final item in a list.
Unstressed initial syllables are often realised with shorter duration and lower intensity. There is also a tendency for the last syllable in an utterance to be lengthened or dragged out.
Singapore English tends towards syllable timing, unlike British English, which is considered stress-timed.
20th-century British English had had significant influence over the development of what is now called Singapore English, and there is still a tendency for some older Singaporeans to use expressions that would be considered old-fashioned in London today. In everyday speech, some words are more ubiquitous in Singapore English, like scoldâÂÂin the UK, tell off is the more natural expression and scold may be regarded as somewhat formal or dated. Still, much of Singapore English vocabulary parallels that of the English spoken in Southern England and other Commonwealth nationsâÂÂbarring some exceptions. Standard Singapore English follows British spelling conventions (e.g., colour and realise, as opposed to color and realize).
Some words unique to Singapore English are lexical innovations, often compound words (e.g., void deck), while some words have taken on completely different meaningsâÂÂfor instance, keep is often used with the meaning of âÂÂput awayâ or âÂÂput (something) backâÂÂ, rather than âÂÂhold on to somethingâÂÂ.
Some colloquial, English-derived phrases and expressions exclusive to Singaporean (and Malaysian) English include , meaning to âÂÂturn a blind eye to somethingâÂÂ, and , meaning âÂÂto raise the bar by overachievingâÂÂ.
Terms derived or borrowed from Hokkien and Malay are commonplace in informal contexts, and are used regularly in Singlish. Some of these loanwords refer to local concepts (e.g., kaya, a type of coconut jam) and are not italicised in print. Other loanwords are generally restricted to colloquial use.
A wide range of foreign English dialects can be heard in Singapore. American and British accents are often heard on local television and radio due to the frequent airing of foreign television programmes.
Unlike Singapore Standard English, Singlish includes many discourse particles and loan words from Malay, Mandarin and Hokkien. Many of such loan words include swear words, particularly Hokkien profanities such as "kanina" and "chee bai". Hence, it is commonly regarded with low prestige in the country and not used in formal communication.
However, Singlish has been used in several locally produced films, including Army Daze, Mee Pok Man and Talking Cock the Movie, among others. Some local sitcoms, in particular Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd, also feature extensive use of Singlish.
The proliferation of Singlish has been controversial and the use of Singlish is not endorsed by the government. Singapore's first two prime ministers, Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong, have publicly declared that Singlish is a substandard variety that handicaps Singaporeans, presents an obstacle to learning standard English, and renders the speaker incomprehensible to everyone except another Singlish speaker. The country's third, Lee Hsien Loong, has also said that Singlish should not be part of Singapore's identity. In addition, the government launched the Speak Good English Movement in 2000 to encourage Singaporeans to speak proper English.
Despite strong criticisms of Singlish, linguist David Yoong has put forward the argument that "Singaporeans who subscribe to Singlish and have a positive attitude towards the code see Singlish as a language that transcends social barriers" and that the language can be used to "forge rapport and, perhaps more importantly, the Singaporean identity". Sociolinguist Anthea Fraser Gupta also argues that Singlish and standard English can and do co-exist, saying that "there is no evidence that the presence of Singlish causes damage to standard English". This was followed by organisers of the Speak Good English Movement clarifying that they are "not anti-Singlish", with their primary intention instead to ensure that Singaporeans are able to speak standard English first. A spokesperson was quoted as saying: "The presence of Singlish causes damage to standard English only when people do not have a good grounding in standard English".
In 2010, speakers of English in Singapore were classified into five different groups:
, English is the most commonly spoken language in Singaporean homes. One effect of mass immigration into Singapore since 2000, especially from China, has been an increase in the proportion of the population to whom English is a foreign language. The most recent trend in Singapore favours an increasing use of English as well as stability in the use of Mandarin at the expense of other varieties of Chinese (apparently as the Chinese population switches first to Mandarin, then to English) while the use of Malay slowly erodes.
In 2010, 52% of Chinese children and 26% of Malay children aged between 5 and 14 speak English at home, as compared to 36% and 9.4% respectively in 2000.
English is Singapore's main and one of the four official languages, along with Malay, Chinese and Tamil. The symbolic national language is Malay for historical reasons. All official signs, legislation and documents are required to be in English, although translations in the other official languages are sometimes included, though it is not necessary. Under the education system, English is the language of instruction for all subjects except the official Mother Tongue languages (the other three official languages) and the literatures of those languages.