Singlish in SingPoWriMo : an ethnographic investigation into the perceived uses of and attitudes towards Singlish in computer-mediated contemporary Singaporean poetry

• Main Author: Han, Rachelle Jia Ling
• Other Authors: Ivan Panović
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Linguistics::Sociolinguistics::Bilingualism::Singapore
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/73490
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The Facebook group SingPoWriMo (which stands for Singapore Poetry Writing Month), represents a glocalised phenomenon at the intersection of computer-mediated communication and poetry, serving as an avenue to explore written representations of Singlish. Given the increase in both multilingual literacy (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2015) and use of social media in Singapore’s population (Hootsuite, 2017), a discourse-centered online ethnographic investigation into the use of Singlish on Facebook would offer insight into the writing practices of Singaporeans, drawing on concepts like the ‘indexical approach’ (Leimgruber, 2012) and the ‘cultural orientation model’ (Alsagoff, 2007; 2010a; 2010b). Direct contact with the social actors of this group enabled the finding that Singlish is not necessarily well-received when encountered in poems, possibly due to its common usage as a comedic device. Furthermore, it can be used to signal otherness depending on the user’s cultural context; in the case of non-Singaporeans, Singlish is used in a semiserious fashion to highlight non-local identity, demonstrating third-order indexicality similar to Pittsburghese (Johnstone et al., 2006). On the other hand, in the case of Singaporeans, the use of Singlish to index otherness culminates in acute awareness of the marginalisation of minority languages in the Sinitic bias towards discussing Singlish.