Hi guys, I’m from Singapore, and given the interest here in restored pronunciations of Latin and Greek and grappling with speaking in a mora-timed manner and what a pitch accent might sound like, I thought that sharing about the creole spoken here might provide a fun but relevant diversion.
I’m not a linguist, and I haven’t read the scholarship, so what I write here is anecdotal and several of my observations may be off the mark.
In its most extreme form, Singlish employs many borrowed words and syntax from the substratum of other languages spoken here, among which are Tamil, Malay, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew, Mandarin. The stress accent of English is replaced by a pitch accent, and vowel qualities of unstressed vowels are realized. In addition, the stress of many words fall on the final syllable(s) instead. So where a Received Pronounciation speaker might read “How to talk to anyone” as (-tuh-tawlk-tuh-<è>-ni-wan), where <> denotes stress, and HAU is a long syllable, a Singlish speaker might say (hau1-too3-tok1-too3-è2-ni1-wan1), where the numbers at the back denote relative pitch in relation to the syllables around it. When stringed together in a sentence, the 1 in HAU may not be realized in the same pitch as the 1 in wan. Syllables with pitch as 1 are considered stressed. In addition, t, k, p are often unaspirated, even in initial position. In addition, many final stops are augmented or supplemented by glottal stops. This, in combination to the syllable-timing, lends a staccato feel to the language.
In particular, observe that “to”'s vowel has the quality of oo rather than that of a schwa.
The more educated a Singlish speaker is, and the more exposure to globalized media, the more the speaker tends favor English syntax, vocabulary and prosody in their speech over Singlish syntax and vocabulary. In recent years, this tendency has made Singlish evolve to be closer to Standard English and be more intelligible to other English speakers, although the educated/exposed ↔ uneducated/local continuum remains.
Here’s a clip on youtube demonstrating a funny conversation in Singlish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwhmJaWIU2M . It’s not very easy to find online samples of the uneducated/local registers of Singlish that demonstrate its most interesting aspects well.
The male speaker speaks a Singlish closer to Standard English than the female speaker, though it is clear that both employ Singlish syntax and prosody. The female speaker probably speaks Chinese dialects primarily, which does not have the range of final consonants that English has, hence her inability to say “fried” in a standard pronunciation.
What are your thoughts on the accent and timing on Singlish? I hope that it was interesting hearing how language and vocabulary you sort of understand is transformed when delivered in a pitch accent.