“Aiyo! Why like that?” The case of gender and Singlish interjections in text messaging

Abstract

This paper examines whether gender affects the use of Singlish interjections. Little is known about the way Singlish interjections are used, as most studies on gender and interjections are focused on the Western context. In addition, no study in Singapore has been conducted to examine this word class from a sociolinguistic approach involving empirical evidence. As a starting point, this study aims to fill the research gap of Singlish interjections and gender by analyzing a corpus of first-hand text data to understand what interjections Singaporean undergraduates use and how they may vary between males and females. A total of 209 interjections were identified from 4652 lines of text message data. After the analysis of results, Singlish interjections can be classified into two main groups, taboo and non-taboo interjections. The frequency of interjections used by males and females showed no apparent difference. Taboo interjections in general were found to be inherently “male”, whereas few inherently “female” interjections were found in this corpus. Within same-gender conversations, the frequency of interjections was notably a lot higher than that of mixed-gender conversations. The findings from this present study are reflective of Singlish culture and reinforce the perception that males exhibit a higher level of expletion in their language.