Has Singlish changed? A study on age-based variation in Singlish

Singlish is an output language formed from a pool of features contributed by various languages in Singapore’s linguistic ecology (Tan, 2017). As the composition of Singapore’s linguistic ecology changes, it should follow that Singlish changes and evolves accordingly, leading to age variation in Sing...

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Main Author: Lee, Xiao Yu
Other Authors: Tan Ying Ying
Format: Final Year Project
Language:English
Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
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Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/138287
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-1382872020-04-30T04:07:09Z Has Singlish changed? A study on age-based variation in Singlish Lee, Xiao Yu Tan Ying Ying School of Humanities yytan@ntu.edu.sg Humanities::Linguistics Humanities::Language Singlish is an output language formed from a pool of features contributed by various languages in Singapore’s linguistic ecology (Tan, 2017). As the composition of Singapore’s linguistic ecology changes, it should follow that Singlish changes and evolves accordingly, leading to age variation in Singlish. To investigate if Singlish has changed, this paper seeks to establish the presence of variation in the Singlish spoken by Singaporeans across different age groups. Tokens of syntactic features of Singlish including copula-deletion, topic prominence, subject omission, construction of interrogatives and the use of the perfective ‘already’ were studied and compared across the speech of three age groups of Singaporean speakers from the National Speech Corpus. This study has found that broadly speaking, there seems to be little to no variation in the Singlish spoken by Singaporeans across different age groups as most of the features studied are still present and used by the speakers. However, by delving deeper into the linguistic contexts surrounding the features studied, variation across the age groups can be observed. The results show that English has an increased influence on the Singlish that younger Singaporeans speak, which highlight Singlish’s potential to evolve and change. Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and Multilingual Studies 2020-04-30T04:07:09Z 2020-04-30T04:07:09Z 2020 Final Year Project (FYP) https://hdl.handle.net/10356/138287 en application/pdf Nanyang Technological University
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
country Singapore
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic Humanities::Linguistics
Humanities::Language
spellingShingle Humanities::Linguistics
Humanities::Language
Lee, Xiao Yu
Has Singlish changed? A study on age-based variation in Singlish
description Singlish is an output language formed from a pool of features contributed by various languages in Singapore’s linguistic ecology (Tan, 2017). As the composition of Singapore’s linguistic ecology changes, it should follow that Singlish changes and evolves accordingly, leading to age variation in Singlish. To investigate if Singlish has changed, this paper seeks to establish the presence of variation in the Singlish spoken by Singaporeans across different age groups. Tokens of syntactic features of Singlish including copula-deletion, topic prominence, subject omission, construction of interrogatives and the use of the perfective ‘already’ were studied and compared across the speech of three age groups of Singaporean speakers from the National Speech Corpus. This study has found that broadly speaking, there seems to be little to no variation in the Singlish spoken by Singaporeans across different age groups as most of the features studied are still present and used by the speakers. However, by delving deeper into the linguistic contexts surrounding the features studied, variation across the age groups can be observed. The results show that English has an increased influence on the Singlish that younger Singaporeans speak, which highlight Singlish’s potential to evolve and change.
author2 Tan Ying Ying
author_facet Tan Ying Ying
Lee, Xiao Yu
format Final Year Project
author Lee, Xiao Yu
author_sort Lee, Xiao Yu
title Has Singlish changed? A study on age-based variation in Singlish
title_short Has Singlish changed? A study on age-based variation in Singlish
title_full Has Singlish changed? A study on age-based variation in Singlish
title_fullStr Has Singlish changed? A study on age-based variation in Singlish
title_full_unstemmed Has Singlish changed? A study on age-based variation in Singlish
title_sort has singlish changed? a study on age-based variation in singlish
publisher Nanyang Technological University
publishDate 2020
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/138287
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