The many faces of English
The English language is chameleon-like: a previous Red Pony Express article noted the ease with which it reaches across the Atlantic and Pacific to cross-pollinate and reinvent itself.
But it goes the other way too. Because of their political history and geography, some countries have grafted onto English their own take, rhythm and identity – in essence, their worldview – to create a tongue entirely their own.
I’m thinking of the many and varied English-based creole languages that are used in countries around the world. Creole is a group of languages whose lexicon and grammar are based on a dominant language – the ‘lexifier’ – but which has been so reshaped that it can be unrecognisable to those who only speak the mainstream lexifier.
I’m attracted to these versions of English because they defy cultivation. Like the garden varieties of English you might find in a government publication, a business report or on the internet, English-based creole is fully functional and governed by grammatical rules.
But perhaps because they can sound like half-baked English and are forged in the crucible that is colonialism, English-based creole have typically struggled for legitimacy. For example, it is little known that Kriol – an English-based creole of northern Australia – is a homegrown Australian language that is also the second most commonly spoken language in the Northern Territory.
Even in countries where the English-based creole is spoken by the majority of its population, there is a view that the creole is a poor cousin to standard English. Let’s take Singlish, a colloquial Singaporean English that is difficult to avoid in the streets of Singapore.
Before 1963, Singapore had been a British colony for 144 years. Its geography has endowed it with an ethnically diverse population including Chinese, Malays and Indians – and that’s just naming the top 3 racial groups in the country. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it has 4 official languages: Chinese, Malay, Tamil and English. In such a hotpot of a society, Singlish has become the favoured language among locals for negotiating everyday life.
Singlish borrows terms and grammatical structures from Malay, Japanese, Tamil and a variety of Chinese dialects (Cantonese, Hokkien and Teochew among others). Although it can sound like broken English, it is governed by a coherent system of grammar that is strongly influenced by the Chinese language.
You can’t really appreciate the full flavour of Singlish on the page, but the following examples give a taste:
Wah, damn hungry, anything to makan a not? I dying already.
I am so hungry. Is there anything to eat? I’m starving here.
(Makan is the Malay term for a ‘meal’ or ‘to eat’.)
Help can or not?
Can you help me?
Can, can, confirm can.
Absolutely.
This mix of street language and plain speak can sound unsettling and at times rude to the uninitiated ear. In 2000, the Singaporean government launched the Speak Good English Movement to discourage use of Singlish because it is ‘corrupted English’ that will make Singaporeans ‘seem less intelligent or competent’ on the world stage. This campaign met with resistance and ultimately failed because it underestimated the extent to which Singlish had united disparate groups and given them national identity and pride.
Arundhati Roy observed that ‘language is that most private and yet most public of things’. It seems to me that many creole languages might have been born to accommodate a people’s need to make sense of disparate cultures and worldviews, to recalibrate these in a way that makes sense of and responds to their reality. Don’t we all use language for that?
And in a time when languages around the world are dying, the resilience of English-based creole in some parts of the world is surely worth celebrating.
