Changing perceptions of Singlish in Singapore

• Main Author: Yeo, Denise
• Other Authors: Tan Ying Ying
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Humanities::Linguistics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/155797
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Singlish has a typically bad reputation since the government aggressively discouraged it in the late 1990s and launched the Speak Good English movement in 2000. This paper seeks to uncover the changing perceptions of Singlish in Singapore before and after the launch of the movement and does so by examining public discourse from newspaper forums, articles, and opinion pieces from local newspapers. A total of 422 excerpts were extracted from 311 articles, and they were analyzed and sorted into 33 relevant themes. In general, there were more positive than negative excerpts across both decades. Number of occurrences of positive themes were found to be relatively consistent between the decades, but with differences in reasons behind the themes. However, prominent negative themes were vastly different in the number of occurrences between the decades. It is concluded that while it might seem that overall results were generally similar for positive, negative, and neutral stances towards Singlish, closer analysis shows clearer differences in emotions, tone, and sentiment between the decades.