How Singaporeans perceive British English as compared to Singlish

1-Proposed Topic Language Phenomenon Social or Cultural Factors Research Question

2Rationale Relevance-Significance-Interest Value
3Explanation and Justification- Details Literature Review

Singaporeans

Education standard and how they correlate with the typical way / manner of speaking

From my basic research on Wikipedia, English spoken by Singaporeans can be classified as either
Standard English or Colloquial English, and can be differentiated to 3 sociolects, the Acrolect,
Mesolect and Basilect, Acrolect being Singaporean English with no significant,standard deviation
from Standard British English, Mesolect being a sentence that has question tenses in an indirect
form, indefinite article deletion, lack of marking in verb forms, Basilect, which comprises of a
generalized is it question, consistent copula deletion and the use of particles like ah and lah
after a sentence. Previous studies from ~ 25 years ago have shown that persons of higher
education tend to speak the acrolect, while those who have lesser formal education tend to
speak the Basilect, a.k.a Singlish. Since 2000, the Singaporean Government has pushed for a
standardized Singapore English, under the Speak Good English program, and standardize English
in Singapore. A 2003 study by the NIE suggests a standard Singaporean pronounciation is on the
cusp of emerging. However, insofar, there has not been a standardization of Singlish in the
dictionaries. Singlish is roughly described by the British Broadcasting Channel. as having coherent,
systematic grammar with heavy influence from Chinese. From a 2007 study by Rani Rubdy from
NIE, all students agree it was good to use good English, the SBE, as compared to Singlish, but in
essays the students used more Mesolects than Acrolects, suggesting that students value good
English more than they actually use it. My read up informs me that Singapores English is
standardizing from Singlish towards a Mesolect in schools. However, there seems to be no data
from which Singaporeans are more comfortable speaking a Mesolect-like Singaporean English,
or the Singlish? outside of informal context

Therefore, my research question now would be that how comfortable are Singaporeans actually
with Singlish, as well as its use, as compared to the SBE? By varying age groups and segmenting
them into 2 groups, (people born post Independence, and again those born around 1985-2000,
taking into account that the Government pushed for standardization of Singapore English around
1999-2000, where the child would be in his or her early teens to younger children), we will be
able to track the movement of the governments efforts in standardizing Singaporean English and
to observe its use change after the governments policy change. I plan to insert a few example
sentences from the 3 sociolects, randomly arranged, and ask which sentences are people most
comfortable with talking to another person in an informal context. Again, the second section for
this questionnaire would be a series of questions detailing the usage of the Acrolect and the
Mesolect (SSE), as compared to the SBE (Standard British English) and include a scale for rating as
well as a question on the persons age and education level (tertiary, postdoc, secondary school
O/A Levels, etc). This idea is novel because a lot of research and effort has been done on
compiling the differences between Standard Singapore English and Standard British English, its RP
(received pronounciations) and its sociolects, the Acrolect, Mesolect and Basilect, however not
enough research is being done on daily use of spoken SSE and accompanying sociolects. A person
will speak the language much more than writing with the language over their lifespan therefore
it is important for the government and its agencies to know what the people feel and should it
be actually rectified or is a Mesolect variant of the Singaporean Standard English good enough
for the populace? It also enables us to know the opinions of the people of Singapore should we
aim to eradicate Singlish for the better good of the economy as Speaking Singlish is doing a
disservice to the nation, as remarked by former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong in 1999, or is that
central to maintaining a unique cultural identity for Singaporeans, like how English varies in
Australia, Canada, US from the SBE? I will be reading up more on its pronounciation and how it is
compared to the other English speaking nations in terms of intonation, accent, length of words,
et cetera.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160919-the-language-the-government-tried-to-suppress
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_English
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Labov
https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-topic-for-sociolinguistics-research
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/yytan/11-tan-ying-ying-mk15.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics