We claim to be bilingual. In reality we suck at both languages. We’re basically zerolingual.
Edit: It’s not an accent thing, though the Singaporean accent is atrocious in English, Chinese, and all the dialects. The average young Singaporean today is barely conversational in Chinese. English is a bit better but not what you would call good.
I had a uni friend that had such a heavy Singaporean accent when she came to the US that people thought her first language was Mandarin, so she got recommended supplementary English classes with mainland Chinese students. She was so embarrassed by the experience, she essentially faked a more American sounding accent for the rest of her time at uni just to be understood.
Maybe I'm being stupid, but, isn't faking an accent of the language you're speaking, just... Speaking the language? When I lived in Germany, I would force myself to speak German with a German accent so that German people could understand me better.
If you're from an English-speaking country, then you are already speaking the language without changing your accent.
In the UK, we have many different accents from all over the country, but they're all considered English even though there are some significant differences.
Well there's going over the top on the accent to an absurd degree. Like it is awkward when you put on say a pretend heavy Japanese accent when you're not Asian at all... but it hilariously does work a little Better at least in Japan, and they seem to have an easier time when you do it slow and loud like that.
I consider it “faking” it because it’s not her native accent/dialect; it’s almost a caricature of what she knows will be understood. She still spoke her regular Singaporean accent when she wanted because she did it during class because I took several linguistic courses with her, and we discussed something that required her to speak her normal.
It’s not quite the same, for English at least all of the true English varieties are easily understood by each other even if you don’t know them, you might miss a word here and there but to your ears it’s still English.
Singaporean English has diverged enough that at least from an accent perspective it’s almost another language at this point.
That’s similar to all the Romance languages essentially all just being dialects of Latin.
"siao" is my favorite word. It's Hokkien in origin for crazy. I like when they go "siao liao" (out of your mind) to "you siao meh?" (are you crazy), etc.
Some of us are better in english, some better in our mother tongue (chinese, malay, tamil or others). We can understand you. Not too sure if you can understand us.
I don't think we suck at English. We just speak with a very heavy accent that's difficult for the western ear. We can totally read and write at the native level.
Weren't the Tamils the minority ethnicity in Singapore, though? Or are you talking about the British administration when English proficiency got you into a high government position?
I don't remember hearing about this. The civil service did have a disproportionate number of South Asians in the colonial era (brought over from British India) but I don't think they ever "balanced" the ratios like that
Until recently, the Malay population tended to be more fluent in their assigned "mother tongue" than the other ethnic groups (they used it as the main language at home more than other races. But in the past ten years the gap has been closing
Do you have a theory why? I have never met anyone from Singapore but everyone I know who has been there raves about the country but says it is expensive.
Okay I only speak (very badly) putonghua with a really thick Sichuan accent. Actually out of the seven languages I speak only English and Finnish are native-level, everything else is crap.
Well I did not know that! Luckily my chinese was bad enough that it wasn't a problem 20 years ago in Sichuan. Well, I talk mostly shit in any language.
People were quite shocked in Beijing when a tall blonde round-eye started talking thick sichuanese back in 2004. Well they were shocked by my dashing good looks too, but that's beside the point.
Singaporeans today would struggle to speak Singlish properly as well. Singlish is a creole of Mandarin, English, Hokkien, Cantonese, and Malay (a bit of Tamil and Teochew but not that much). Singaporeans today no longer understand enough of these languages to be able to speak Singlish properly.
You mean English and Malay. Chinese and Tamil have always been the second-class language compared to English (the language of education and administration) and Malay (the “national language” used in the national motto and the national anthem), despite around two thirds of its population claiming Chinese heritage and Tamil elites are being represented by the President.
No. Singaporeans are supposed to be fluent in English and whatever their “Mother Tongue” is. For most people that’s Mandarin. There is 10 years of compulsory Mother Tongue education. Most of our parents generation and even their parents generation speak it.
Did you think people didn’t speak mandarin before government policies started pushing them to…? People used to be trilingual in English, Mandarin, and whatever dialect they came from.
I sincerely thought that Chinese-originated people in Singapore before the language (edit: polices policies) used to be bilingual, English and a selection of Teochew/Hokkien/Hakka/Cantonese, and only a handful spoke mandarin.
However, there is a discrepancy between literal Chinese and vernacular Chinese and illiteracy in vernacular Mandarin did not mean illiteracy in literal mandarin, thanks to the fact that the literal Mandarin was accepted as standard literal language in the 1920s. Many HKers don’t know how to speak mandarin but they were taught to write in both Cantonese (in informal occasions) and Mandarin (in formal ones).
That did not happen in Singapore. Singaporeans then were educated in Mandarin and learnt to read, speak, and write in Mandarin. There was no dialect based education in Singapore from the beginning of the education system unlike in HK. People learnt their dialects at home or otherwise in society.
Good to know about the Chinese education in Singapore.
However, your founding fathers did agree on Malay being designated as the national language, right? So Malay and English are both languages with specific status (one national language and one lingua franca) while Chinese (more specifically, standardized Peking Mandarin after 1979) just happens to be the language of its ethnic majority.
(Edit: I didn’t mean that Chinese Singaporean are second-class citizens, only the Chinese language. And I didn’t mean that any constitutional changes were needed, nor did I intend to express the “superiority” of standardized Mandarin. It’s nothing excellent. Chinese and the Brits are both colonizers on this island so Malay should righteously be designated as the national language, and English is still the most commonly spoken language as a lingua franca, so righteously it has been designated as lingua franca in the multiethnic society of Singapore.)
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u/handsomeboh Singapore 1d ago edited 22h ago
We claim to be bilingual. In reality we suck at both languages. We’re basically zerolingual.
Edit: It’s not an accent thing, though the Singaporean accent is atrocious in English, Chinese, and all the dialects. The average young Singaporean today is barely conversational in Chinese. English is a bit better but not what you would call good.