Singapore English: Structure, variation, and usage by Jakob R. E. Leimgruber (review)

Jakob Leimgruber’s book is an updated version of his Ph.D. thesis entitled Modelling variation in Singapore English, completed in 2009 at Oxford University. The thesis title is a better fit with the content of the book, which is heavy on the traditional sociolinguistic descriptions of Singapore English, but rather light on grammatical structure and even lighter on usage. The book has six chapters and three appendices. Ch. 1, ‘Singapore and its Englishes’, narrates the history of Singapore since its annexation by the British in 1819 and the ethnic and linguistic composition over nearly 200 years. It also introduces the early views of Singapore English when the vernacular started to attract scholarly attention in the 1970s. These early views are covered in greater detail in Ch. 2. To collect data for his Ph.D. thesis, and the book, L conducted individual or group interviews in Singapore in the early 2000s, amounting to some sixteen hours of recordings. The interviews were carefully designed with due consideration to the usual sociolinguistic factors, such as register and formality. Though not large, the database of the recorded materials provides carefully calibrated data that supplement the data from published sources.

It is well known to students of contact languages that New Englishes exhibit enormous variation in terms of grammatical structure and user proficiency. Singapore English is no exception. How to characterize this variation has occupied the attention of linguists for the past half century, as L demonstrates in Ch. 2, ‘Variation in Singapore English: Old and new models’. Of the models that have been proposed in the literature on Singapore English, L mentions four at some length, two ‘old’ and two ‘new’. While the old models see the variability of Singapore English as a post-creole continuum or diglossia, the two new models approach the vernacular from the perspectives of culture and indexical field, respectively, and treat the inherited and locally derived morphosyntactic features as sociolinguistic variables that reveal the speaker’s cultural orientation or social stances. In crucial respects, the four models introduced in the chapter are heavily influenced by the prevailing sociolinguistic theory—from postcreole continuum (DeCamp 1971) to diglossia (Ferguson 1959) to indexical field (Eckert 2008). But the indexical interpretation of the lexical or structural variables of Singapore English must be handled with care. Consider the conversational fragment shown in 1 (56).

1. 1. We can eat hor fun there, I heard that the hor fun ∅ quite famous. [to microphone] er hor fun means rice noodles.

This fragment contains the locally derived word hor fun, a missing copula, and third-person verb agreement. L explains that the missing copula indexes the local stance, caused probably by the presence of hor fun; but the use of verb agreement, which represents the global stance, is an attempt by the speaker to break through the local stance for the benefit of outsiders. This explanation, though plausible, is not compelling. It requires a leap of faith to jump from the observed morphosyntactic features to the fine-tuned social meanings, or stances, that L attributes to them. Copula deletion, for example, is optional in Singapore English; that much can be established through even casual observation. The optionality, however, is not necessarily correlated with specific speaker intentions.

Chs. 3 and 4 are devoted to the structure of Singapore English, citing from the existing literature along with additional data from L’s recordings. Ch. 3 (‘Description: Phonology and lexicon’) gives an overview of the sounds and words of Singapore English, all in seven pages. We learn that the lexicon contains words from the local languages Malay (makan ‘food, eat’), Hokkien (ang moh ‘Westerner’), and Cantonese (hor fun ‘rice noodle’). One may add that recent Chinese borrowings are Mandarin-based, for example, weibo ‘blog’, reflecting the successful dialect-to-Mandarin shift that the Chinese community has experienced in the fifty years of independence. Since descriptions of many of the phonetic or phonological features were first...