Has Singlish changed? A study on age-based variation in Singlish

Abstract

Singlish is an output language formed from a pool of features contributed by various languages in Singapore’s linguistic ecology (Tan, 2017). As the composition of Singapore’s linguistic ecology changes, it should follow that Singlish changes and evolves accordingly, leading to age variation in Singlish. To investigate if Singlish has changed, this paper seeks to establish the presence of variation in the Singlish spoken by Singaporeans across different age groups. Tokens of syntactic features of Singlish including copula-deletion, topic prominence, subject omission, construction of interrogatives and the use of the perfective ‘already’ were studied and compared across the speech of three age groups of Singaporean speakers from the National Speech Corpus. This study has found that broadly speaking, there seems to be little to no variation in the Singlish spoken by Singaporeans across different age groups as most of the features studied are still present and used by the speakers. However, by delving deeper into the linguistic contexts surrounding the features studied, variation across the age groups can be observed. The results show that English has an increased influence on the Singlish that younger Singaporeans speak, which highlight Singlish’s potential to evolve and change.