I am following the language log this week, so that I could have a better idea of what's going on during the reading session on Wednesday night. Besides reading quite a bit of Mair's post on Chinglish, the latest post by Eric Baković was quite interesting and pretty relevant to our country's situation as well.
Apparently, actress Emma Thompson had said on an occasion that youngsters' poor language use is driving her crazy and she called for awareness of the need to speak appropriately to the situation or occassion.
"There is the necessity to have two languages - one that you use with your mates and the other that you need in any official capacity. Or you're going to sound like a knob," she added.
This comment of "having two languages" really struck a chord with me. I have always thought of myself as being a little weird and I thought I probably had a sort of pretence in me when I spoke to different people. I would be speaking standard Hanyu Pinyin style Mandarin to my students in and out of class, a slightly "relaxed" and localised version after they graduated and become more like my juniors; then I would be speaking Mandarin with a slight Beijing accent with my mainland Chinese friends, accentuating words with the right kind of varied intonation (since we tend to be less expressive in tones when we are at home). I could also do Mandarin with a slight Taiwanese accent for the whole week when my family's Taiwanese friends came over to stay with us.
Then there's English, which I could rattle off in a "standard" (it has been quoted as there are debates on what "standard" is.) , localised or slightly American accented way. Unfortunately, the supposedly Scottish accent has not made a significant appearance in my life yet and I still couldn't make much sense out of the phonetics difference that the good old Scottish uses to try speaking in their accent.
Of course I could also do a perfect rendition of Singlish (either Chinese peppered with English and dialect terms or English peppered with Chinese terms ) , so much so that recently, I received a word of caution from my close friend that I am really lacking in awareness and my language seems to be pretty "polluted" since I left my frontline job in the classroom. I have since reminded myself to be more conscious, since I should be going back to the classroom in the future soon, lest language attrition occurs. Then there's the language that you use with people who are officials ( I recall my dad being very pleased with himself for trying his newly acquired "Law and Order" kind of language on a special occassion. ) versus the language that you would use with heartlanders, as well as the language that you would use to make connection with your relatives......and the list goes on......
It so happened that our lecture on sociolinguistics touched on this topic today and the content has been categorised under "Language and Identity" . I came off from the lecture acknowledging the notion that the usage of Singlish was really a natural way of identity forming. Perhaps it's not really national identity (since the older generation tend to have less mixed-lingual phenomenon), just identity of some form. Nonetheless, I have exemplified it to my students that of course there's a need to know how to speak appropriately at the right times. However, just as the people who posted the comments on the language log article revealed, some teenagers might not even know what's wrong. It's really no wonder that we have this very "weird" "Speak Good English" campaign since 2000. I called it "weird" since we are supposedly teaching our children and teenagers English at a first language level but that's beside the point in this blog entry. I searched for the first official speech online and it helped me recall what was said by then DPM Lee .
"There is nothing wrong for us to inject a few Chinese or Malay words to our daily usage of English, when we are talking about local things, especially food. Char kway teow is char kway teow, not rice noodles fried with egg, cockles and sweet black sauce; even chao guo tiao does not quite taste the same. Likewise with nasi lemak. But it is wrong to think that we are only Singaporean if we speak Singlish. We want to strengthen our common Singaporean identity, but let us do so in other ways, and not by using Singlish."
Besides the mockery that I felt about this campaign, I really appreciate some of the efforts being put into the drive to get people to speak or toe learn how to speak appropriately in different situations. However, to be about to code-switch between the standard form of languages (or the more posh form) and the colloquial form probably requires the speaker to be relatively proficient in the languages that he is code-switching from too. Hence, I thought that perhaps it is not that much of a mockery after all. However, I am not so sure about not using Singlish to identify ourselves. It is obviously not the perfect choice and it is obviously not the best candidate in the list of criteria but it has already occurred and it is probably just something that happens naturally as our society evolves. Perhaps, the nicer way to put it is, let's use our Singapore accent but not Singlish to identify ourselves ?
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