Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/178272
Title: Who’s being elitist? A debate about the enregisterment of Singlish
Authors: Lu, Luke
Keywords: Arts and Humanities
Issue Date: 2024
Source: Lu, L. (2024). Who’s being elitist? A debate about the enregisterment of Singlish. Language in Society, 1-23. https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404524000162
Journal: Language in Society 
Abstract: This article is a rejoinder to Lee (2023) who makes certain claims about the enregisterment of Singlish via a case study of Spiaking Singlish. In challenging Lee’s key claim that Spiaking Singlish deploys a form of elitist language, I argue that the Singlish features in the book need not demand a solely ludic reading and actually draw from everyday practices. Accordingly, enregisterment ought to be understood as a diachronic and evolving process in the vein of Butler’s (1999) notion of sedimentation. Moreover, Lee’s characterization of the ‘monolectal Singlish user’ is classist and reductionist, unsupported by recent research and census data. Consequently, Spiaking Singlish need not be seen as an elitist work, but as contributing to ever-changing attitudes towards Singlish in the public sphere. This article is an alternative iteration to Lee’s (2023) that has implications for the way we understand enregisterment in Singapore and choose to represent it as a process. (Enregisterment, Singlish, Singapore, sociolinguistics, language ideological debates).
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/178272
ISSN: 0047-4045
DOI: 10.1017/S0047404524000162
Schools: School of Humanities 
Rights: © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Fulltext Permission: open
Fulltext Availability: With Fulltext
Appears in Collections:SoH Journal Articles

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