Standard English In Singapore Essay

As Richards (1983) states, Singapore English differs a bit from the Standard British English in grammar and vocabulary, and more noticeably in phonology.

To understand the situation, we should know that Singapore was under British colonial rule from 1819 until 1965. Before 1965, the standard form of English in Singapore had always been British English and "Received Pronunciation", which was brought to the island. As Bao (2001) indicates, education in the English language only took place after Singapore gained its independence in 1965, therefore, English in Singapore began to take a life of its own, which led to the development of the now known as Standard Singapore English. Singapore is considered nowadays a cosmopolitan melting pot of ethniticies. Chinese, Malays and Indians, descendants of immigrants who arrived in the island throughout its history, are the majority of the population. But Singapore 's Standard English began to evolve

An early attempt was by Platt (1975), who considered Singlish and Standard English to be varieties at the extremes of a post-creole continuum. In this model, the continuum consists of sub-varieties of English that are increasingly more like Singlish the closer they are to the ‘lower’ (or ‘basilectal’) end of the 11 scale, and increasingly more like Standard English the closer they are to the ‘upper’ (or ‘acrolectal’) end of the continuum. This linguistic continuum is then presented next to a social continuum that takes education as its measure of social ranking. Each speaker, then, is seen to have at his disposal an acrolect that is commensurate with his position on the social scale, as well as the basilect Singlish, and all varieties existing between the two. Therefore, speakers have at their disposal a certain ‘range’ of the continuum, the breadth of which depends on their location on the educational continuum, which they can choose from for the purposes of stylistic