More thoughts

If the last 2 posts have seem a little contradictory, they are in fact not. As said, I applaud the sociolinguists view of recognising the evolutionary nature of languages and thus the existence of varieties of languages. At the same time, because mankind has decided, with his ability to dwell deep into philosophical issues, to come up with Language Standards, therefore, the evolution of language and language varieties has become a more complicated issue than ever. The last post was about the usage of Chinese in Singapore and how certain translations (at this moment, it is restricted to nouns) have been replaced with some other places' standard overnight (or over a few days) in the media. I am not sure if I am right to view it in this way, but some part of the variety of Chinese that has been in existence in Singapore for as long as I have been reading and watching the news ( I haven't had time to do a research on terminology usage in our media, so I could only based it on my own experience) has been altered within a few days. Or perhaps, it is an attempt to alter some parts of our own variety. Now, that said, our variety of Chinese doesn't differ that much from the adopted standard. However, we have been keeping our localised terms and certain ways of expressions, which are unique to us, and are not ungrammatical. For this issue, I am talking about the written language.

In the case of the post about HK English and Singapore English, the case study used in the lecture was in fact about the written language too (HK English). However, probably in most situations, Singlish as Singaporeans understand it, is about the spoken language and is a creole based on a mixture of a few languages. Hence, there is a fundamental difference between the two issues.

Nonetheless, in both cases, I celebrate the recognition of variation and varieties.

Therefore, in the case of the Chinese used in media, I thought we should be more aware and proud of our grammatically correct local variety, since it is what most of the population who do understand Chinese have been using. In sociolinguistics view, it is the people who uses the language in that local context that bring about the variation over time. In my prof's book, this evolution has to do with identity building as well.

In the case of Singapore English, grammatically correct but varied use of the language should probably be accepted, as suggested by prof. So, it is probably fine to start a sentence with the word "Besides", instead of "Furthermore" or "Moreover".  However, in his case study, there were actually glaring grammatical errors which has been analysed as a feature of HK English, and suggested to be accepted as a variety. Perhaps, it is because HK English is not that complicated a creole or variety after all ? Since sociolinguists tend to examine languages in its spoken form, it seems pretty confusing to use the same yardstick on both spoken and written, creoles and parent languages. Unless we start to teach creoles in school ?

In conclusion, I do celebrate the unique heritage of the island I live on , and am proud of the varieties which have emerged in spite of our short history.