mind your language

One thing about being a student of the humanities is that more often than not, the things raised in class really get you thinking. I’m taking a class on minorities in Southeast Asia and the discussion today was centred on a reading about creolized Chinese societies in said region. If you don’t know what “creolized” means (I didn’t) it’s basically the outcome of a mixing and melding of cultures and languages that eventually exhibits some properties of the originals but is something else altogether. Think Babas, Peranakans and how we’ve ended up with half the goodies we eat during Chinese New Year being of Malay origin.

Language certainly played a huge part in the formation of these creolized societies and it wasn’t long before the topic of Singlish came up. Can Singlish be considered a full fledged creolized language and not simply classified under the government-censured moniker of “bad English”? After all, societies in places like Louisiana in the United States and Mauritius in Africa have melded French, along with their respective native languages, into an amalgam that is now recognised as a language on its own; a language known as Creole. Are we not entitled to label Singlish as our very own language as well?

As it turns out, Singlish cannot be considered a distinct language because it is still essentially English, albeit with a very different grammar structure and a whole lot of words wrangled from other languages. The reason why it hasn’t made the leap and, in all likelihood, will not is everywhere on our little island state. On buses, trains, taxi-cabs, walls, websites and God knows where else. Many of them exhort us to speak good English while others feature Hossan Leong telling us that “hua yi cool”. They are, in large part, the reason why we haven’t gone the way of the Nawliners or the Mauritians. Well at least that’s what I’ve garnered so far.

Really makes you wonder doesn’t it? What kind of impact would a language of our own have on a nation whose people find themselves at a loss when it comes to thinking about their cultural heritage. From my perspective, it seems like so many of us call ourselves Chinese but identify far more with an archipelago on the edge of Asia than with the Middle Kingdom. We seek to distance ourselves from the colonial moniker and yet we are encouraged to learn to speak “proper” English. I don’t know enough about the Indians and Malays to be able to make anything other than sweeping statements but to me, the idea of a language all of our own is something that is really exciting. What if we’d let nature take its course and developed something of our own. English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil in their pure forms would still be learnt of course, but as accessories to something we could truly call our very own Mother Tongue. After all almost all of us Singaporeans are at least partially bilingual. I really doubt it would be much of an aberration.

Ok I’ve somehow allowed this to get really long and anyway, my nasi lemak’s here.

But just think.