Q: What is wrong with the Singaporean accent?
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Title : Q: What is wrong with the Singaporean accent?
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Title : Q: What is wrong with the Singaporean accent?
link : Q: What is wrong with the Singaporean accent?
news-today.world | Okay guys, I've stumbled upon this article that has been shared on social media and boy I wanna respond to it. There's a commentary piece on the CNA website entitled "What's wrong with the Singaporean accent" by Dr Tan Ying Ying of NTU. In her piece, she defends the Singaporean accent and whilst she write in grammatically perfect English, she stresses that she does speak with a Singaporean accent. Unfortunately, I felt her piece is very one sided; by all means Dr Tan can speak with whatever accent she wants, but she needs to get off her academic high horse and step into the real world. Now for those of you not familiar with my blog, I was born and raised in Singapore and have spent 21 years of my adult life in Europe. I speak 20 languages (7 of them fluently) but unlike Dr Tan, I don't directly use my languages for a living as I can make helluva lot more money in corporate finance than she ever will in academia (sorry to be crass Dr Tan, but there's a good reason why a lot of brilliant students fail to make a lot of money in the real world). So whilst Dr Tan may spend her days studying about linguistics, I just get on with learning new languages and I'm currently learning Hindi after having conquered languages as diverse as Welsh to Spanish to Russian. What I do share with Dr Tan is a passion for linguistics as a subject, where we part company however, is our attitude towards the Singaporean accent.
Dr Tan's article started out on a point that I definitely agree with - accents do give us a glimpse into a person's life: we can tell a lot about a person just from the way they speak, whether they are local or foreign, whether they are highly educated or barely literate, whether they are middle class or working class. What she doesn't distinguish is the context of this first impression we give with our accents: is this in a relaxed environment, such as last Friday evening when I ran into my friend Alicia at the gym and she introduced me to the friend she has come with? Or is it a far more formal business environment, where I am sent by my company to go do a sales pitch for a very important client, trying to win a £250 million contract? Clearly, the two circumstances I have described above are very different: context is everything. So in the scenario with Alicia, her friend happened to look Asian and I was trying to see if she happened to be from somewhere like Singapore or Malaysia and when I detected a Singaporean accent, I switched to Singlish to establish rapport. Whereas when I am in the business world, I would definitely leave my Singaporean accent at the door and speak with a upper-class British accent in order to convince these old British bankers that I am their social equal and not some immigrant who sounds quite different from them. Again, my goal is to establish rapport with the other party - I'm always putting the other person first rather than thinking about myself. This is a key point: are you willing to adapt to the context by always putting the other person first, or are you going to behave like a bull in a china shop and say, "this is how I speak and if you don't like it, screw you, you're the asshole." How are you going to get along with people like that?
Allow me to state something important here: I'm autistic. I have Asperger's syndrome. However, as I am acutely aware of my condition, I do go out of my way to compensate for it by always reminding myself to express empathy, It means always putting others first and putting yourself second - if there are ten people in the social situation, it means putting my own means last and putting everyone else first. Now let me illustrate to you what happens when people fail to do that: recently, I had gone to a popular Thai restaurant in London with a client from work (let's call him Fred, not his real name). As it was extremely busy that evening, we had to share a table with three people and as they were friendly, I started chatting to them. So the lady whom I had just met asked Fred what he did for a living, I knew she wasn't really interested, she was just making polite conversation. What Fred was meant to do was to simply answer her question with one or two sentences and no more, then ask her in return, "and what do you do for a living?" No, instead Fred went on and on and on about what he did in corporate finance, giving her way too much information to the point where I could see that she was literally staring into her Thai Green Curry, avoiding any eye contact with him. Clearly, she wasn't interested at all but unfortunately, Fred didn't have enough empathy or social skills to care if she was responding well to the way he was communicating with her. He just kept going on and on regardless! I felt really embarrassed and awkward - my only consolation was that we were going to finish that Thai meal, walk out and never ever meet that lady ever again. That's the kind of shit that happens when you put yourself first: you come across as an autistic asshole with no social skills.
Now you could argue that Fred lacked social skills, but what has this to do with one's accent? Remember, context is everything and if we're talking about the context of Singapore, then your accent plays a huge role in any communication done in English. Are you willing to alter your accent to suit the situation and context, putting the other person first? The way you feel about your natural accent has absolutely nothing to do with how you choose to communicate with the different people you meet on a daily basis. When I am in Singapore, how I speak in a formal business meeting is extremely different from the kind of language I would use to order my food in a hawker center - it is called code switching and most Singaporeans are actually really good at this. Surely training Singaporeans to learn how to code switch effectively is vital. What Dr Tan seems to be advocating is for Singaporeans to adopt this, "there's absolutely nothing wrong with the way I speak" attitude regardless of the social context and I find that truly quite disturbing; after all, may I remind you that I'm autistic, if you go around with that kind of attitude, people are going to find you insufferable and dismiss you as an arrogant, autistic asshole devoid of any humility. She seems far more interested in furthering her own agenda about how the Singaporean accent should be treated as equal with all other more internationally respected accents than actually considering how her people actually use English in a very practical manner to communicate better.
So, from a very practical and pragmatic business perspective, what I would advocate that Singaporean students are taught how to speak English with a very neutral, international accent devoid of any kind of Singaporean or Asian accent. That way, they would feel confident enough to communicate with people from other countries, knowing that they would be easily understood. Then whilst they are in the company of their own friends and family, they can speak whichever way they like. It is not the job of the teacher to tell the students that there's nothing wrong with having an accent, rather it is the job of the teacher to equip the students with the necessary skills to use English effectively in the working world. Dr Tan is plain wrong when she claims that "the Singaporean accent is well-understood across the world". How well Singaporeans are understood by a foreigner depends on how strong their accent is, it is a sliding scale: if the speaker has but a hint of a Singaporean accent in what is otherwise clear, grammatically perfect English, then the speaker will be understood easily. But if the accent is very strong and then you add in elements of Singlish, then foreigners will find it increasingly hard to understand the Singaporean in question. Thus Dr Tan made a sweeping statement in claiming that we're well-understood across the world when that's clearly false: the kind of English spoken by a well educated professional Singaporean like DPM Tharman for example is very different from your typical older Ah Soh in Sembawang.
The onus is still on the individual to make a genuine effort to ensure s/he is well understood and only a completely autistic person devoid of any empathy would be oblivious to that fact. After all, Singaporean students spend so much time, energy and effort doing subjects like mathematics which will be totally useless to the majority of students who will never ever need to use mathematics in their working lives, yet somehow, mathematics is forced upon the students as if it is such a vitally crucial skill for life. How about teaching students something that is actually going to be extremely practical and useful, as in how to communicate with foreigners who struggle to understand English with a Singaporean accent? Singaporeans often make the wrongful assumption that because they can easily understand American English (say when watching a Hollywood movie), that the reverse would be true, that somehow Americans would have no problem understanding a Singaporean speaking English with a thick Singaporean accent. The reason is simple: Singaporeans are exposed to American English on a daily basis and thus have loads of practice and familiarity with it, but the reverse simply isn't true. Heck, there were many Americans who had absolutely no idea where the hell Singapore is and thought that Trump was meeting Kim Jong-Un somewhere in China. So your average American in Kansas City probably has never even heard of Singapore before, let alone have had any exposure at all to any Singaporean English. Thus by that token, no Dr Tan, they don't have a clue what you're saying when you do speak with a Singaporean accent.
I also take issue with the way she has attacked her student 'Tom' in her article. I actually feel sorry for the way she went out of her way to make Tom feel bad about the way he was trying to speak English - from the story, I see a guy who was making a genuine effort to try to speak English properly, in a way that would make him come across as articulate and eloquent. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that and perhaps as a young university student, he hasn't quite gotten there yet but that's perfectly fine by me. Tom's accent is work in progress and that's what we go to university for: we are there to learn about the subject we're studying, we're there to learn about the world around us and we are there to grow up, to become better people through this process of learning. From the way Dr Tan dealt with Tom, it seemed like she was shoving him into a pigeon hole: you are Singaporean Chinese, your parents are Singaporean, you live in Singapore, you've never lived abroad so you have no right to speak the way you speak, you jolly sound more like me, like an authentic Singaporean. She wasn't simply behaving in an unkind and unprofessional manner towards her student - she was projecting her own insecurities onto him. But instead of engaging him, she made him feel very uncomfortable and shut down any discussion on the issue. That is totally the wrong way a teacher should approach the issue! Tom is an adult, a student at a university - why couldn't she have shown him the respect as a fellow adult and have a civilized, intellectual conversation on the issue with him? Young people like Tom should be given the freedom to explore different ways to express himself, rather than be ordered to speak and sound a certain way just to please people like Dr Tan.
This then becomes an issue of human behaviour rather than linguistics. Don't hide behind the guise of academia Dr Tan, there is no justification for this kind of behaviour. I have this relative, let's call her Auntie Hua (not her real name, obviously). Growing up, I remember the way she would speak to my mother at family gatherings, I used to think it was quite funny listening to Auntie Hua speak because she would badmouth everyone in the family and recycle any kind of rumour or secondhand information. If a cousin failed an exam, if someone in the family lost his job or even got as much as a parking ticket, you would hear about it first from Auntie Hua. The fact is her personal life was a real mess: she was trapped in a deeply unhappy marriage (her husband had numerous affairs) and holding down a dead-end job that paid peanuts in order to make ends meet. Auntie Hua was not a happy woman, she had many problems. So in order to feel good about herself, she decided to remind others how messed up their lives are so she wouldn't feel too bad about herself. I was told how she went out of her way to make my mother feel bad about having two daughters and that my mother couldn't have a son until I came along. You might have met people like that before and Dr Tan is no different. Instead of trying to engage Tom in a constructive conversation about the role that accents play in communication, she simply went out of her way to make him feel bad for having a different accent. By that token, Dr Tan's behaviour is really no different from Auntie Hua and having a fancy title at her university doesn't make what she did any less despicable.
Going back to Tom, why should Tom have to speak a particular way, such as like his parents? Look, my mother speaks Singlish and my father doesn't even speak English at all. Thankfully, I am very lucky and have been educated in the best universities in the UK and France - furthermore, I have worked in many countries over the years which have contributed to the fact that I can speak so many languages fluently today. Do I speak English like my parents? Of course not. My parents received their education in British-Malaya, back in the 1940s and 1950s, that was an awfully long time ago when the quality of education was very poor, mostly because of the poverty back then. They didn't have the kind of education I had the benefit of having and so that's why we do not sound the same when we express ourselves. Am I unique in this aspect? Of course not, many Singaporeans around my age experience the same situation too - they have a much better grasp of the English language compared to their parents because we received a much better quality of education in the 1980s and 1990s compared to our parents back in the day. So why is Dr Tan expecting us to somehow speak English the same way as our parents? It is simply an illogical presumption based on some kind of emotional definition of what it means to be Singaporean, rather than simply looking at the evidence before us and accepting that this difference is a function of the way Singapore has changed beyond recognition over the last few decades. It is evident that Singapore has changed a lot, so how can you expect our accents to sound just like our parents in light of these huge changes?
Dr Tan has a huge problem with the fact that Tom's accent is 'learned' - that means he didn't grow up with people who spoke with that accent, instead he had gleamed it from the white people on TV programmes, movies, pop music and the internet. But so what? Why is that such a bad thing? Tom is growing up in a different world, a world defined by the modern technology we use and it is bound to have a massive influence on the way he expresses himself. But allow me to pull back the focus from Tom and look at my parents: my dad is mostly Mandarin speaking and my mother speaks mostly in English with a very strong Singaporean accent or Singlish. However, going back a generation further, my father's parents spoke Hakka with some Malay and on my mother's side, they spoke Hokkien with some Malay. Not surprisingly, none of my grandparents spoke a word of English or Mandarin at all - therefore, the two languages I had to do in school in Singapore were effectively foreign languages and not my 'mother tongue' at all. Since my father never bothered to teach me any Hakka, the only two mother tongues I can speak today are Hokkien and Malay. But since I'm not ethnically Malay (well, I'm mostly Chinese but I am actually mixed - it is a long story) I do consider Hokkien as my proper mother tongue (even if English is clearly my first language and by most definitions, my rightful mother tongue as well). I didn't even grow up in an English speaking household, given that my father doesn't understand English, we would just default to Mandarin out of respect to him, to make sure that he wasn't excluded from any of the conversations in his presence.
So if you were to study the pattern of the way my family spoke, each generation spoke a different language. In just three generations, we had gone from Hakka, Hokkien and Malay to mostly Mandarin with some Singlish and the languages I use most often on a day by day basis today are English, French, German and Spanish. Some languages were lost along the way - for example, neither of my sisters speak any Malay and none of us speak a word of Hakka; new ones were gained along the way. I speak a large number of languages like French, Spanish, Welsh, German and Italian which none of my parents or grandparents ever spoke. Whilst English has become one of the official languages of Singapore and it is the main language of education and business in Singapore today, it still isn't a language unique to Singapore but is in fact the world's most spoken language (if we include people who speak it as a second or foreign language rather than just native speakers). It functions as a lingua franca for people who don't speak a language in common, for example when I was in Croatia some years back, I was travelling on a tram in Zagreb with some Brazilian tourists asking for directions and they communicated with the locals in English. So when Dr Tan claims, "Research on English in Singapore over the last decade has shown that English is no longer someone else’s language." Well that simply isn't true, English is a truly global language now and even if you do speak it in Singapore, you can't lay claim to it as your own. By all means, speak in Singlish or English with a Singaporean accent with your friends and family in Singapore - but also teach students how to communicate confidently and efficiently with foreigners who struggle to understand English with a Singaporean accent.
As someone who enjoys learning foreign languages, I have to make sure I follow the rules of the language rather than simply pronounce them as an English speaker. So for example, the letter J is pronounced rather differently in different European languages. In languages like German, Polish and Swedish, it is like a Y in English. But in Spanish, it becomes a H and in French, Catalan and Portuguese, it become like a cross between zh and sh, like the 'si' sound in the word 'vision'. Likewise, the place names in China often confuse non-speakers of Mandarin: I cringed when this English client I dealt with pronounced Guangzhou as "Guang-zoo" but if she has never learnt the rules of Pinyin, how was she supposed to know how that was meant to be pronounced? Therein lies the difference between a native speaker and a foreign learner: the foreign learner of a language would not be familiar with all the rules of pronunciation and thus would make mistakes that a native speaker would never make. This is how one ends up with an accent that quickly makes you sound like a foreigner trying to speak the language, rather than a native speaker. So for example, Singaporeans really struggle with the digraph TH, so a Singaporean would typically turn the word 'without' into 'wivout' or 'widout' as they cannot pronounce the TH. Is this merely having an accent or clearly a mispronunciation? Where do you draw the line in terms of allowing such mistakes in the name of an accent and when does the Singaporean accent descend into Singlish then?
Allow me to make a point about accents with a funny story: my French friend Charlotte had been learning Mandarin and I do encourage her to practice her Mandarin with me. So when I was in a restaurant with her, she drank the tea, turned to me and said something that sounded like "en-ao'uh". I was left wondering if she was speaking French, English or Mandarin - in fact, I thought she had said the words "an hour" in English, but what the hell did that have to do with the tea? Fortunately, her husband (who is also French and is now fluent in Mandarin) realized that I didn't understand her so he explained, "she said 很好喝 (hěn hǎo hē)". Then I realized what had happened: she was speaking Mandarin with a thick French accent. You see, the H in French is silent and some French people, particularly those not fluent in English would treat all Hs in English as if they are silent letters, resulting in them having that distinctly French accent. Charlotte's husband who had been trying to teach her Mandarin was quite used to her unique brand of Mandarin with a French accent, so he was able to understand her perfectly. I, on the other hand, was left wondering what the hell she was trying to say and was left baffled. Would you defend Charlotte's right to have an accent when she speaks Mandarin? Or would you tell her, "nobody is going to understand what you're trying to say like this, please we have got to get rid of your French accent if you're going to learn how to speak Mandarin properly." Evidently, any kind of accent can be a problem with any language and nobody should be arrogant enough to think that their accent so perfect that it is beyond reproach.
I remember back in the late 1990s, when I was learning French at l'Alliance Française near Newton Circus in Singapore, the Singaporean students were quite obedient in being willing to be taught how to pronounce French words properly. Why were we so obedient? I suppose it was because none of us spoke much (or any) French and we had to be taught from scratch, so that made us humble in the classroom and a lot more willing to listen to the teacher. I suppose we had also all paid good money to learn French properly, so we could end up speaking French properly and confidently, rather than someone who had just spent a few minutes memorizing a few sentences then completely mispronouncing all the words. We gladly allowed the teacher to correct our mistakes and we diligently took notes to ensure that we wouldn't make the same stupid mistakes again. So why is it a bunch of Singaporeans can have such a humble attitude towards a foreign language like French, but get so incredibly defensive over another foreign language, English? Why do Singaporeans like Dr Tan get so upset when a Singaporean tries to take a more humble attitude and speak English like a native speaker? Should we treat all languages with the same rigour in trying to pronounce the words properly? Why should English be any different by that token then? What gives Dr Tan the right to play fast and loose when it comes to her accent when speaking English then? Good grief, I wouldn't want her as a student in a French class - with that stubborn attitude, I think she would just be impossible to teach. "how dare you - there's nothing wrong with my accent!"
Dr Tan thinks that any kind of 'learnt accents' is fake or imperfect but I profoundly disagree with her on that point. I don't see one's accent as being set in stone but rather it is work in progress. Let me share with you my journey in French. I didn't do French at secondary school but started learning it on my own in NS before taking some night classes at l'Alliance Française during the last year of my NS stint. So in my first year, I was learning French from my sister's old textbooks and library books - I mispronounced a lot of words and had a distinctly Singaporean accent when trying to speak French. When I attended l'Alliance Française, I ended up copying the other Singaporean students and sometimes copying their mistakes. However, I then moved to France to study at two universities (including Paris-IV Sorbonne) and then went on to work in France. My accent changed and improved a great deal when I was thrown in a French-speaking environment, today French has become my second language and I have near-native fluency. When I speak French, most French people think that I am either French or someone who has lived in France a long time. How did I change my accent in French? I did exactly what Dr Tan hated - it was mimicry, when I lived amongst French people I paid great attention to how they spoke and I copied them in a bid to sound more authentically French, rather than a foreigner with a strange accent. This is a vital step for anyone learning a foreign language, so Dr Tan's stance is baffling to say the least.
So, why does Dr Tan have such an issue with mimicry then? It is a huge part of learning any language - be it your own mother tongue or a second/foreign language. This is a very Singaporean way of approaching the whole concept of learning: people like Dr Tan expect students to learn properly in a very controlled classroom environment whereas polyglots like me who speak many languages mostly just pick them up on our own. I speak 20 languages but have only formally studied four of them, the other 16 were completely self-taught and in the absence of a teacher, mimicry is a vital part of learning. She claims that it is random and the copycat is never the real deal - but I beg to differ. If you never try to copy anyone else, then your spoken English will never ever improve. The purpose of language isn't trying to sound 100% authentic as a native speaker, but rather it is a tool to communicate and if you can inject some of your personality into your accent, then why not? Students should be encouraged to have fun with language, explore the issue of accents and how that plays a role in communication, rather than for her to shut the conversation down by labeling people like 'Tom' as fake copycats. You see, a teacher in the West would gladly allow students to have the freedom to make up their own minds on the issue whilst a teacher in the East like Dr Tan would simply put her foot down and say, "no, you can't do that, shut up and listen to me, this is the way it is and what you think doesn't matter." Such an attitude from a teacher stifles any kind of creativity and that is just terrible: most people who are attracted to the study of languages are the creative type and would not respond well to Dr Tan's methods. She epitomizes the very worst kind of typical East Asian teacher.
Take my Spanish for example: I have never ever had a formal lesson in Spanish in my life before, yet I am fluent in the language. I had a few books, but mostly it was gleamed through watching a lot of Spanish-language TV programmes from Spain and Latin America and of course, I am lucky to have a lot of Spanish-speaking friends who are happy to converse with me only in Spanish and never in English. Many Singaporeans will think that it is impossible to become fluent in a language like that, without any formal instruction from a teacher in a classroom. But I'd like to share with you an experience I had in Tunisia - there were these young kids probably no more than like 10 years old who were selling souvenirs to the tourists on the beach and they all spoke about seven languages each: certainly Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Italian, German and Russian because those were the languages they needed to speak in order to make a living. Did they speak English fluently with me? No, they made some mistakes but they were not afraid to converse with me and one of the kids even knew a smattering of Mandarin. Were these kids rich kids who were sent to some kind of language institute from a young age to learn so many foreign languages? Hell no, if they didn't sell enough souvenirs, they didn't eat - they were that poor. Hunger was their motivation and in the absence of a fancy language school, they learnt how to speak all these foreign languages through mimicry during their interactions with the tourists. They were selling cheap plastic, tacky souvenirs, but most tourists bought something because we were just so incredibly impressed with their language skills. Mind you, Paul from Langfocus told a very similar story on his Youtube channel (see below).
Is Dr Tan's attitude towards the way we learn languages unusual? Actually, no she is a rather typical Singaporean. My parents are both retired teachers: my mother taught English amongst other things and my father taught Chinese, both at the same primary school in Ang Mo Kio for many years. I have this memory back in my NS days about how my father commented that I was just learning French to, "学来玩玩而已" (learning it just for fun) - he never thought I was serious about learning French because I was teaching myself French, rather than taking a formal course at a language school. Then later when I started working in Germany, he told me that I should get a formal qualification in German, like the equivalent of an O or A level certificate. I tried to reason with him, the whole reason why you get a certificate is to prove that you can speak German, in order to get work in Germany but I am already working in Germany because the Germans are perfectly happy with the standard of my German; so what the hell do I need a certificate for? But of course, he doesn't get it, he just can't get his head around that concept - he's a teacher. I just told him, "I don't need a teacher! I have just rendered you useless." If everyone had that attitude of "what the hell do I need a certificate or a degree for? I'll just prove to my prospective employer that I can do the job", then many teachers will be out of a job! Many schools and universities would close and of course, people like my father believe firmly that no, we can't have that, we need teachers, teachers play a very important role and people need paper qualifications. So like my father, Dr Tan is in her little bubble within academia, totally cut off from the real world (oh that big bad working world out there) and out of touch with reality.
Let's look at one of the other languages that we speak in Singapore: Mandarin. Older Chinese Singaporeans like my father tend to speak Mandarin with a very strong accent, so for example they would pronounce the word 如果 as lúguǒ rather than rúguǒ - that's a very comment error as the consonant R doesn't exist in most southern Chinese dialects, thus it is quite common to hear people who speak Hokkien as a first language to turn their Rs in Mandarin into Ls (that happens a lot in Taiwan too). Now because I am so reliant on Hanyu Pinyin to write Chinese characters on my phone and on my computer, I need to be extremely strict with myself when it comes to getting the Pinyin right, because you're simply not going to get the word '如果' if you type 'luguo' into your phone or computer. The predictive text will probably give you something like 路过 instead! Thus the vital role that Pinyin plays in writing Chinese text with a QWERTY keyboard has made my generation a lot better with our Mandarin pronunciation, so we would pronounce words like 如果 correctly unlike the older generation. The effect that this technology and a better understanding of the use of Pinyin had on the younger generation is that they have quite a different accent from the older generation in Singapore - so is this a bad thing? I say it is definitely a good thing, on the basis that if you read 如果 as lúguǒ instead of rúguǒ, that is a mistake and the fact that a lot of older people in places like Singapore and Taiwan make that mistake doesn't make it any less of a mistake. It is simply a mistake that is made by so many people that is has become a huge part of the regional accent.
I take great issue with the way Dr Tan misused the term "a profound linguistic insecurity". The way she has presented her argument reeks of, "there's nothing wrong with the way I speak, how dare you criticize me and think that my accent is any less worthy than an American or British accent". In fact, her entire article reeks of her deep insecurity. She then backs her argument up by claiming that there are other accents in the world which are harder to understand than the Singaporean accent - whilst that may be true, two wrongs don't make a right. Imagine if you have someone with a thick South African accent speaking to someone with an equally thick Singaporean accent and neither party is willing to compromise and speak a more international brand of English that is easier to understand, what are you left with? Confusion, chaos and frustration because both parties are unable to communicate despite speaking the same language but they are too proud and defensive about their accents to even compromise a little. Being proud of having an accent doesn't help you communicate with people outside your local community - you can be proud of your culture, your ethnicity, your community, of where you come whilst still speaking English without a strong regional accent. That kind of pride is a personal feeling that reflects your relationship with the place you come from. If you wish to express that pride through your accent in the way you talk, then that's your choice, but I stress that's a personal choice, not an obligation or a duty. You express yourself the way you want, do what makes you feel most happy (regardless of what Dr Tan thinks).
Dt Tan claimed, "there is nothing poor or defective about the way we sound." Yeah right, according to who? Her? Her own biased research? Well, that's just her opinion and I beg to differ. If you want to feel confident or even proud of the way you sound, then it takes more than simply asking people to feel proud about their accent - pride doesn't work like that. You wanna feel proud, then damnit, earn that right to feel proud. That's why I think it is utter bullshit when I hear people making statements like, "I feel proud to be Chinese". WTF? Seriously? Look, I didn't choose to be Chinese, nor did I choose to be Singaporean - I just happened to be born into a Chinese-Singaporean family, I didn't get a choice in the matter at all. If you happen to speak English really well, if you have a stunningly good command of the English language because you have worked really hard to learn it, then fair enough, please do take pride in your English language ability. Ultimately, if you are able to communicate effectively in English, then by all means take pride in that but you need to know what you're feeling proud about. Dr Tan has offered no solutions and has simply given us a long rant about how she thinks there's absolutely nothing wrong with her accent. Simply changing one's attitude towards the Singaporean accent isn't going to help young Singaporeans communicate more efficiently with other people in the future.
Finally, when I am in Singapore, I speak a rojak mix of Singlish, Mandarin, Malay and Hokkien - often mixing them up in the same sentence. Back in July, I met up with one of my regular readers Choaniki and we converse mostly in Hokkien, of course he is highly educated and speaks English as well (as you can see from his eloquently presented comments) but I choose to express myself in Hokkien with him in order to establish rapport and feel a sense of connection through our common language. And here's the vital part of the equation that Dr Tan conveniently avoided: Singaporeans are not just English speaking, most of us are multilingual. I may have lived in Europe for the last 21 years, but I still speak Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese and Malay because I grew up in Singapore. Then of course, there's Singlish as well. The linguistic landscape of Singapore is far more complex than any other English speaking country and that what makes Singapore so unique from a linguistic point of view. Singaporeans thus can choose to express their identity through a variety of languages from Singlish to Hokkien to Mandarin/Singdarin to to Malay to English with a Singaporean accent, or a mix of all of the above (which is what I tend to do). I speak English without a Singaporean accent, but if I wanted to establish rapport quickly with a fellow Singaporean, I would use Hokkien or even Malay mixed with some Singlish but never just English! Our knowledge of these other languages is what makes us unique. This should be utterly fascinating to any serious academic interested in linguistic, but because it didn't suit Dr Tan's very simplistic narrative, she chose to just ignore it. If I was marking her essay, I would fail her for this gross oversight. Do your research properly next time!
Is there a debate to be had about this issue, about the relation between Singaporeans and their accent? Of course there is, it is a thoroughly fascinating topic for people who like linguistics. We could talk so much about how Singapore is a unique multi-lingual country that happens to use English as an official language: how in Singapore, it is paradoxically nobody's language and everybody's language at the same time. Yet Dr Tan's article was poorly written and stank of her own insecurities, it was one-sided and she didn't once try to consider a balanced argument. It read like a PAP propaganda piece, it was like someone gave her some money and told her to write a piece to make Singaporeans feel good about their culture. Despite her credentials, Dr Tan's article didn't come across as a serious discussion about this aspect of linguistics - instead, it was at best a poorly written piece of political propaganda, at worst, the rant of an insecure, unhappy woman (not unlike Auntie Hua). Oh dear Dr Tan, how do you account for this rather shoddy piece of writing? That's it from me on this issue - what do you think? How do you feel about the way Singaporeans speak? Do you have a Singaporean accent when you speak English? Have you met teachers like Dr Tan before and how do you feel about teachers like that? What do you make of Tom's accent? Do leave a comment below and many thanks for reading!
Dr Tan's article started out on a point that I definitely agree with - accents do give us a glimpse into a person's life: we can tell a lot about a person just from the way they speak, whether they are local or foreign, whether they are highly educated or barely literate, whether they are middle class or working class. What she doesn't distinguish is the context of this first impression we give with our accents: is this in a relaxed environment, such as last Friday evening when I ran into my friend Alicia at the gym and she introduced me to the friend she has come with? Or is it a far more formal business environment, where I am sent by my company to go do a sales pitch for a very important client, trying to win a £250 million contract? Clearly, the two circumstances I have described above are very different: context is everything. So in the scenario with Alicia, her friend happened to look Asian and I was trying to see if she happened to be from somewhere like Singapore or Malaysia and when I detected a Singaporean accent, I switched to Singlish to establish rapport. Whereas when I am in the business world, I would definitely leave my Singaporean accent at the door and speak with a upper-class British accent in order to convince these old British bankers that I am their social equal and not some immigrant who sounds quite different from them. Again, my goal is to establish rapport with the other party - I'm always putting the other person first rather than thinking about myself. This is a key point: are you willing to adapt to the context by always putting the other person first, or are you going to behave like a bull in a china shop and say, "this is how I speak and if you don't like it, screw you, you're the asshole." How are you going to get along with people like that?
Allow me to state something important here: I'm autistic. I have Asperger's syndrome. However, as I am acutely aware of my condition, I do go out of my way to compensate for it by always reminding myself to express empathy, It means always putting others first and putting yourself second - if there are ten people in the social situation, it means putting my own means last and putting everyone else first. Now let me illustrate to you what happens when people fail to do that: recently, I had gone to a popular Thai restaurant in London with a client from work (let's call him Fred, not his real name). As it was extremely busy that evening, we had to share a table with three people and as they were friendly, I started chatting to them. So the lady whom I had just met asked Fred what he did for a living, I knew she wasn't really interested, she was just making polite conversation. What Fred was meant to do was to simply answer her question with one or two sentences and no more, then ask her in return, "and what do you do for a living?" No, instead Fred went on and on and on about what he did in corporate finance, giving her way too much information to the point where I could see that she was literally staring into her Thai Green Curry, avoiding any eye contact with him. Clearly, she wasn't interested at all but unfortunately, Fred didn't have enough empathy or social skills to care if she was responding well to the way he was communicating with her. He just kept going on and on regardless! I felt really embarrassed and awkward - my only consolation was that we were going to finish that Thai meal, walk out and never ever meet that lady ever again. That's the kind of shit that happens when you put yourself first: you come across as an autistic asshole with no social skills.
Now you could argue that Fred lacked social skills, but what has this to do with one's accent? Remember, context is everything and if we're talking about the context of Singapore, then your accent plays a huge role in any communication done in English. Are you willing to alter your accent to suit the situation and context, putting the other person first? The way you feel about your natural accent has absolutely nothing to do with how you choose to communicate with the different people you meet on a daily basis. When I am in Singapore, how I speak in a formal business meeting is extremely different from the kind of language I would use to order my food in a hawker center - it is called code switching and most Singaporeans are actually really good at this. Surely training Singaporeans to learn how to code switch effectively is vital. What Dr Tan seems to be advocating is for Singaporeans to adopt this, "there's absolutely nothing wrong with the way I speak" attitude regardless of the social context and I find that truly quite disturbing; after all, may I remind you that I'm autistic, if you go around with that kind of attitude, people are going to find you insufferable and dismiss you as an arrogant, autistic asshole devoid of any humility. She seems far more interested in furthering her own agenda about how the Singaporean accent should be treated as equal with all other more internationally respected accents than actually considering how her people actually use English in a very practical manner to communicate better.
So, from a very practical and pragmatic business perspective, what I would advocate that Singaporean students are taught how to speak English with a very neutral, international accent devoid of any kind of Singaporean or Asian accent. That way, they would feel confident enough to communicate with people from other countries, knowing that they would be easily understood. Then whilst they are in the company of their own friends and family, they can speak whichever way they like. It is not the job of the teacher to tell the students that there's nothing wrong with having an accent, rather it is the job of the teacher to equip the students with the necessary skills to use English effectively in the working world. Dr Tan is plain wrong when she claims that "the Singaporean accent is well-understood across the world". How well Singaporeans are understood by a foreigner depends on how strong their accent is, it is a sliding scale: if the speaker has but a hint of a Singaporean accent in what is otherwise clear, grammatically perfect English, then the speaker will be understood easily. But if the accent is very strong and then you add in elements of Singlish, then foreigners will find it increasingly hard to understand the Singaporean in question. Thus Dr Tan made a sweeping statement in claiming that we're well-understood across the world when that's clearly false: the kind of English spoken by a well educated professional Singaporean like DPM Tharman for example is very different from your typical older Ah Soh in Sembawang.
The onus is still on the individual to make a genuine effort to ensure s/he is well understood and only a completely autistic person devoid of any empathy would be oblivious to that fact. After all, Singaporean students spend so much time, energy and effort doing subjects like mathematics which will be totally useless to the majority of students who will never ever need to use mathematics in their working lives, yet somehow, mathematics is forced upon the students as if it is such a vitally crucial skill for life. How about teaching students something that is actually going to be extremely practical and useful, as in how to communicate with foreigners who struggle to understand English with a Singaporean accent? Singaporeans often make the wrongful assumption that because they can easily understand American English (say when watching a Hollywood movie), that the reverse would be true, that somehow Americans would have no problem understanding a Singaporean speaking English with a thick Singaporean accent. The reason is simple: Singaporeans are exposed to American English on a daily basis and thus have loads of practice and familiarity with it, but the reverse simply isn't true. Heck, there were many Americans who had absolutely no idea where the hell Singapore is and thought that Trump was meeting Kim Jong-Un somewhere in China. So your average American in Kansas City probably has never even heard of Singapore before, let alone have had any exposure at all to any Singaporean English. Thus by that token, no Dr Tan, they don't have a clue what you're saying when you do speak with a Singaporean accent.
I also take issue with the way she has attacked her student 'Tom' in her article. I actually feel sorry for the way she went out of her way to make Tom feel bad about the way he was trying to speak English - from the story, I see a guy who was making a genuine effort to try to speak English properly, in a way that would make him come across as articulate and eloquent. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that and perhaps as a young university student, he hasn't quite gotten there yet but that's perfectly fine by me. Tom's accent is work in progress and that's what we go to university for: we are there to learn about the subject we're studying, we're there to learn about the world around us and we are there to grow up, to become better people through this process of learning. From the way Dr Tan dealt with Tom, it seemed like she was shoving him into a pigeon hole: you are Singaporean Chinese, your parents are Singaporean, you live in Singapore, you've never lived abroad so you have no right to speak the way you speak, you jolly sound more like me, like an authentic Singaporean. She wasn't simply behaving in an unkind and unprofessional manner towards her student - she was projecting her own insecurities onto him. But instead of engaging him, she made him feel very uncomfortable and shut down any discussion on the issue. That is totally the wrong way a teacher should approach the issue! Tom is an adult, a student at a university - why couldn't she have shown him the respect as a fellow adult and have a civilized, intellectual conversation on the issue with him? Young people like Tom should be given the freedom to explore different ways to express himself, rather than be ordered to speak and sound a certain way just to please people like Dr Tan.
This then becomes an issue of human behaviour rather than linguistics. Don't hide behind the guise of academia Dr Tan, there is no justification for this kind of behaviour. I have this relative, let's call her Auntie Hua (not her real name, obviously). Growing up, I remember the way she would speak to my mother at family gatherings, I used to think it was quite funny listening to Auntie Hua speak because she would badmouth everyone in the family and recycle any kind of rumour or secondhand information. If a cousin failed an exam, if someone in the family lost his job or even got as much as a parking ticket, you would hear about it first from Auntie Hua. The fact is her personal life was a real mess: she was trapped in a deeply unhappy marriage (her husband had numerous affairs) and holding down a dead-end job that paid peanuts in order to make ends meet. Auntie Hua was not a happy woman, she had many problems. So in order to feel good about herself, she decided to remind others how messed up their lives are so she wouldn't feel too bad about herself. I was told how she went out of her way to make my mother feel bad about having two daughters and that my mother couldn't have a son until I came along. You might have met people like that before and Dr Tan is no different. Instead of trying to engage Tom in a constructive conversation about the role that accents play in communication, she simply went out of her way to make him feel bad for having a different accent. By that token, Dr Tan's behaviour is really no different from Auntie Hua and having a fancy title at her university doesn't make what she did any less despicable.
Going back to Tom, why should Tom have to speak a particular way, such as like his parents? Look, my mother speaks Singlish and my father doesn't even speak English at all. Thankfully, I am very lucky and have been educated in the best universities in the UK and France - furthermore, I have worked in many countries over the years which have contributed to the fact that I can speak so many languages fluently today. Do I speak English like my parents? Of course not. My parents received their education in British-Malaya, back in the 1940s and 1950s, that was an awfully long time ago when the quality of education was very poor, mostly because of the poverty back then. They didn't have the kind of education I had the benefit of having and so that's why we do not sound the same when we express ourselves. Am I unique in this aspect? Of course not, many Singaporeans around my age experience the same situation too - they have a much better grasp of the English language compared to their parents because we received a much better quality of education in the 1980s and 1990s compared to our parents back in the day. So why is Dr Tan expecting us to somehow speak English the same way as our parents? It is simply an illogical presumption based on some kind of emotional definition of what it means to be Singaporean, rather than simply looking at the evidence before us and accepting that this difference is a function of the way Singapore has changed beyond recognition over the last few decades. It is evident that Singapore has changed a lot, so how can you expect our accents to sound just like our parents in light of these huge changes?
Dr Tan has a huge problem with the fact that Tom's accent is 'learned' - that means he didn't grow up with people who spoke with that accent, instead he had gleamed it from the white people on TV programmes, movies, pop music and the internet. But so what? Why is that such a bad thing? Tom is growing up in a different world, a world defined by the modern technology we use and it is bound to have a massive influence on the way he expresses himself. But allow me to pull back the focus from Tom and look at my parents: my dad is mostly Mandarin speaking and my mother speaks mostly in English with a very strong Singaporean accent or Singlish. However, going back a generation further, my father's parents spoke Hakka with some Malay and on my mother's side, they spoke Hokkien with some Malay. Not surprisingly, none of my grandparents spoke a word of English or Mandarin at all - therefore, the two languages I had to do in school in Singapore were effectively foreign languages and not my 'mother tongue' at all. Since my father never bothered to teach me any Hakka, the only two mother tongues I can speak today are Hokkien and Malay. But since I'm not ethnically Malay (well, I'm mostly Chinese but I am actually mixed - it is a long story) I do consider Hokkien as my proper mother tongue (even if English is clearly my first language and by most definitions, my rightful mother tongue as well). I didn't even grow up in an English speaking household, given that my father doesn't understand English, we would just default to Mandarin out of respect to him, to make sure that he wasn't excluded from any of the conversations in his presence.
So if you were to study the pattern of the way my family spoke, each generation spoke a different language. In just three generations, we had gone from Hakka, Hokkien and Malay to mostly Mandarin with some Singlish and the languages I use most often on a day by day basis today are English, French, German and Spanish. Some languages were lost along the way - for example, neither of my sisters speak any Malay and none of us speak a word of Hakka; new ones were gained along the way. I speak a large number of languages like French, Spanish, Welsh, German and Italian which none of my parents or grandparents ever spoke. Whilst English has become one of the official languages of Singapore and it is the main language of education and business in Singapore today, it still isn't a language unique to Singapore but is in fact the world's most spoken language (if we include people who speak it as a second or foreign language rather than just native speakers). It functions as a lingua franca for people who don't speak a language in common, for example when I was in Croatia some years back, I was travelling on a tram in Zagreb with some Brazilian tourists asking for directions and they communicated with the locals in English. So when Dr Tan claims, "Research on English in Singapore over the last decade has shown that English is no longer someone else’s language." Well that simply isn't true, English is a truly global language now and even if you do speak it in Singapore, you can't lay claim to it as your own. By all means, speak in Singlish or English with a Singaporean accent with your friends and family in Singapore - but also teach students how to communicate confidently and efficiently with foreigners who struggle to understand English with a Singaporean accent.
As someone who enjoys learning foreign languages, I have to make sure I follow the rules of the language rather than simply pronounce them as an English speaker. So for example, the letter J is pronounced rather differently in different European languages. In languages like German, Polish and Swedish, it is like a Y in English. But in Spanish, it becomes a H and in French, Catalan and Portuguese, it become like a cross between zh and sh, like the 'si' sound in the word 'vision'. Likewise, the place names in China often confuse non-speakers of Mandarin: I cringed when this English client I dealt with pronounced Guangzhou as "Guang-zoo" but if she has never learnt the rules of Pinyin, how was she supposed to know how that was meant to be pronounced? Therein lies the difference between a native speaker and a foreign learner: the foreign learner of a language would not be familiar with all the rules of pronunciation and thus would make mistakes that a native speaker would never make. This is how one ends up with an accent that quickly makes you sound like a foreigner trying to speak the language, rather than a native speaker. So for example, Singaporeans really struggle with the digraph TH, so a Singaporean would typically turn the word 'without' into 'wivout' or 'widout' as they cannot pronounce the TH. Is this merely having an accent or clearly a mispronunciation? Where do you draw the line in terms of allowing such mistakes in the name of an accent and when does the Singaporean accent descend into Singlish then?
Allow me to make a point about accents with a funny story: my French friend Charlotte had been learning Mandarin and I do encourage her to practice her Mandarin with me. So when I was in a restaurant with her, she drank the tea, turned to me and said something that sounded like "en-ao'uh". I was left wondering if she was speaking French, English or Mandarin - in fact, I thought she had said the words "an hour" in English, but what the hell did that have to do with the tea? Fortunately, her husband (who is also French and is now fluent in Mandarin) realized that I didn't understand her so he explained, "she said 很好喝 (hěn hǎo hē)". Then I realized what had happened: she was speaking Mandarin with a thick French accent. You see, the H in French is silent and some French people, particularly those not fluent in English would treat all Hs in English as if they are silent letters, resulting in them having that distinctly French accent. Charlotte's husband who had been trying to teach her Mandarin was quite used to her unique brand of Mandarin with a French accent, so he was able to understand her perfectly. I, on the other hand, was left wondering what the hell she was trying to say and was left baffled. Would you defend Charlotte's right to have an accent when she speaks Mandarin? Or would you tell her, "nobody is going to understand what you're trying to say like this, please we have got to get rid of your French accent if you're going to learn how to speak Mandarin properly." Evidently, any kind of accent can be a problem with any language and nobody should be arrogant enough to think that their accent so perfect that it is beyond reproach.
I remember back in the late 1990s, when I was learning French at l'Alliance Française near Newton Circus in Singapore, the Singaporean students were quite obedient in being willing to be taught how to pronounce French words properly. Why were we so obedient? I suppose it was because none of us spoke much (or any) French and we had to be taught from scratch, so that made us humble in the classroom and a lot more willing to listen to the teacher. I suppose we had also all paid good money to learn French properly, so we could end up speaking French properly and confidently, rather than someone who had just spent a few minutes memorizing a few sentences then completely mispronouncing all the words. We gladly allowed the teacher to correct our mistakes and we diligently took notes to ensure that we wouldn't make the same stupid mistakes again. So why is it a bunch of Singaporeans can have such a humble attitude towards a foreign language like French, but get so incredibly defensive over another foreign language, English? Why do Singaporeans like Dr Tan get so upset when a Singaporean tries to take a more humble attitude and speak English like a native speaker? Should we treat all languages with the same rigour in trying to pronounce the words properly? Why should English be any different by that token then? What gives Dr Tan the right to play fast and loose when it comes to her accent when speaking English then? Good grief, I wouldn't want her as a student in a French class - with that stubborn attitude, I think she would just be impossible to teach. "how dare you - there's nothing wrong with my accent!"
Dr Tan thinks that any kind of 'learnt accents' is fake or imperfect but I profoundly disagree with her on that point. I don't see one's accent as being set in stone but rather it is work in progress. Let me share with you my journey in French. I didn't do French at secondary school but started learning it on my own in NS before taking some night classes at l'Alliance Française during the last year of my NS stint. So in my first year, I was learning French from my sister's old textbooks and library books - I mispronounced a lot of words and had a distinctly Singaporean accent when trying to speak French. When I attended l'Alliance Française, I ended up copying the other Singaporean students and sometimes copying their mistakes. However, I then moved to France to study at two universities (including Paris-IV Sorbonne) and then went on to work in France. My accent changed and improved a great deal when I was thrown in a French-speaking environment, today French has become my second language and I have near-native fluency. When I speak French, most French people think that I am either French or someone who has lived in France a long time. How did I change my accent in French? I did exactly what Dr Tan hated - it was mimicry, when I lived amongst French people I paid great attention to how they spoke and I copied them in a bid to sound more authentically French, rather than a foreigner with a strange accent. This is a vital step for anyone learning a foreign language, so Dr Tan's stance is baffling to say the least.
So, why does Dr Tan have such an issue with mimicry then? It is a huge part of learning any language - be it your own mother tongue or a second/foreign language. This is a very Singaporean way of approaching the whole concept of learning: people like Dr Tan expect students to learn properly in a very controlled classroom environment whereas polyglots like me who speak many languages mostly just pick them up on our own. I speak 20 languages but have only formally studied four of them, the other 16 were completely self-taught and in the absence of a teacher, mimicry is a vital part of learning. She claims that it is random and the copycat is never the real deal - but I beg to differ. If you never try to copy anyone else, then your spoken English will never ever improve. The purpose of language isn't trying to sound 100% authentic as a native speaker, but rather it is a tool to communicate and if you can inject some of your personality into your accent, then why not? Students should be encouraged to have fun with language, explore the issue of accents and how that plays a role in communication, rather than for her to shut the conversation down by labeling people like 'Tom' as fake copycats. You see, a teacher in the West would gladly allow students to have the freedom to make up their own minds on the issue whilst a teacher in the East like Dr Tan would simply put her foot down and say, "no, you can't do that, shut up and listen to me, this is the way it is and what you think doesn't matter." Such an attitude from a teacher stifles any kind of creativity and that is just terrible: most people who are attracted to the study of languages are the creative type and would not respond well to Dr Tan's methods. She epitomizes the very worst kind of typical East Asian teacher.
Take my Spanish for example: I have never ever had a formal lesson in Spanish in my life before, yet I am fluent in the language. I had a few books, but mostly it was gleamed through watching a lot of Spanish-language TV programmes from Spain and Latin America and of course, I am lucky to have a lot of Spanish-speaking friends who are happy to converse with me only in Spanish and never in English. Many Singaporeans will think that it is impossible to become fluent in a language like that, without any formal instruction from a teacher in a classroom. But I'd like to share with you an experience I had in Tunisia - there were these young kids probably no more than like 10 years old who were selling souvenirs to the tourists on the beach and they all spoke about seven languages each: certainly Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Italian, German and Russian because those were the languages they needed to speak in order to make a living. Did they speak English fluently with me? No, they made some mistakes but they were not afraid to converse with me and one of the kids even knew a smattering of Mandarin. Were these kids rich kids who were sent to some kind of language institute from a young age to learn so many foreign languages? Hell no, if they didn't sell enough souvenirs, they didn't eat - they were that poor. Hunger was their motivation and in the absence of a fancy language school, they learnt how to speak all these foreign languages through mimicry during their interactions with the tourists. They were selling cheap plastic, tacky souvenirs, but most tourists bought something because we were just so incredibly impressed with their language skills. Mind you, Paul from Langfocus told a very similar story on his Youtube channel (see below).
Is Dr Tan's attitude towards the way we learn languages unusual? Actually, no she is a rather typical Singaporean. My parents are both retired teachers: my mother taught English amongst other things and my father taught Chinese, both at the same primary school in Ang Mo Kio for many years. I have this memory back in my NS days about how my father commented that I was just learning French to, "学来玩玩而已" (learning it just for fun) - he never thought I was serious about learning French because I was teaching myself French, rather than taking a formal course at a language school. Then later when I started working in Germany, he told me that I should get a formal qualification in German, like the equivalent of an O or A level certificate. I tried to reason with him, the whole reason why you get a certificate is to prove that you can speak German, in order to get work in Germany but I am already working in Germany because the Germans are perfectly happy with the standard of my German; so what the hell do I need a certificate for? But of course, he doesn't get it, he just can't get his head around that concept - he's a teacher. I just told him, "I don't need a teacher! I have just rendered you useless." If everyone had that attitude of "what the hell do I need a certificate or a degree for? I'll just prove to my prospective employer that I can do the job", then many teachers will be out of a job! Many schools and universities would close and of course, people like my father believe firmly that no, we can't have that, we need teachers, teachers play a very important role and people need paper qualifications. So like my father, Dr Tan is in her little bubble within academia, totally cut off from the real world (oh that big bad working world out there) and out of touch with reality.
Let's look at one of the other languages that we speak in Singapore: Mandarin. Older Chinese Singaporeans like my father tend to speak Mandarin with a very strong accent, so for example they would pronounce the word 如果 as lúguǒ rather than rúguǒ - that's a very comment error as the consonant R doesn't exist in most southern Chinese dialects, thus it is quite common to hear people who speak Hokkien as a first language to turn their Rs in Mandarin into Ls (that happens a lot in Taiwan too). Now because I am so reliant on Hanyu Pinyin to write Chinese characters on my phone and on my computer, I need to be extremely strict with myself when it comes to getting the Pinyin right, because you're simply not going to get the word '如果' if you type 'luguo' into your phone or computer. The predictive text will probably give you something like 路过 instead! Thus the vital role that Pinyin plays in writing Chinese text with a QWERTY keyboard has made my generation a lot better with our Mandarin pronunciation, so we would pronounce words like 如果 correctly unlike the older generation. The effect that this technology and a better understanding of the use of Pinyin had on the younger generation is that they have quite a different accent from the older generation in Singapore - so is this a bad thing? I say it is definitely a good thing, on the basis that if you read 如果 as lúguǒ instead of rúguǒ, that is a mistake and the fact that a lot of older people in places like Singapore and Taiwan make that mistake doesn't make it any less of a mistake. It is simply a mistake that is made by so many people that is has become a huge part of the regional accent.
I take great issue with the way Dr Tan misused the term "a profound linguistic insecurity". The way she has presented her argument reeks of, "there's nothing wrong with the way I speak, how dare you criticize me and think that my accent is any less worthy than an American or British accent". In fact, her entire article reeks of her deep insecurity. She then backs her argument up by claiming that there are other accents in the world which are harder to understand than the Singaporean accent - whilst that may be true, two wrongs don't make a right. Imagine if you have someone with a thick South African accent speaking to someone with an equally thick Singaporean accent and neither party is willing to compromise and speak a more international brand of English that is easier to understand, what are you left with? Confusion, chaos and frustration because both parties are unable to communicate despite speaking the same language but they are too proud and defensive about their accents to even compromise a little. Being proud of having an accent doesn't help you communicate with people outside your local community - you can be proud of your culture, your ethnicity, your community, of where you come whilst still speaking English without a strong regional accent. That kind of pride is a personal feeling that reflects your relationship with the place you come from. If you wish to express that pride through your accent in the way you talk, then that's your choice, but I stress that's a personal choice, not an obligation or a duty. You express yourself the way you want, do what makes you feel most happy (regardless of what Dr Tan thinks).
Dt Tan claimed, "there is nothing poor or defective about the way we sound." Yeah right, according to who? Her? Her own biased research? Well, that's just her opinion and I beg to differ. If you want to feel confident or even proud of the way you sound, then it takes more than simply asking people to feel proud about their accent - pride doesn't work like that. You wanna feel proud, then damnit, earn that right to feel proud. That's why I think it is utter bullshit when I hear people making statements like, "I feel proud to be Chinese". WTF? Seriously? Look, I didn't choose to be Chinese, nor did I choose to be Singaporean - I just happened to be born into a Chinese-Singaporean family, I didn't get a choice in the matter at all. If you happen to speak English really well, if you have a stunningly good command of the English language because you have worked really hard to learn it, then fair enough, please do take pride in your English language ability. Ultimately, if you are able to communicate effectively in English, then by all means take pride in that but you need to know what you're feeling proud about. Dr Tan has offered no solutions and has simply given us a long rant about how she thinks there's absolutely nothing wrong with her accent. Simply changing one's attitude towards the Singaporean accent isn't going to help young Singaporeans communicate more efficiently with other people in the future.
Finally, when I am in Singapore, I speak a rojak mix of Singlish, Mandarin, Malay and Hokkien - often mixing them up in the same sentence. Back in July, I met up with one of my regular readers Choaniki and we converse mostly in Hokkien, of course he is highly educated and speaks English as well (as you can see from his eloquently presented comments) but I choose to express myself in Hokkien with him in order to establish rapport and feel a sense of connection through our common language. And here's the vital part of the equation that Dr Tan conveniently avoided: Singaporeans are not just English speaking, most of us are multilingual. I may have lived in Europe for the last 21 years, but I still speak Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese and Malay because I grew up in Singapore. Then of course, there's Singlish as well. The linguistic landscape of Singapore is far more complex than any other English speaking country and that what makes Singapore so unique from a linguistic point of view. Singaporeans thus can choose to express their identity through a variety of languages from Singlish to Hokkien to Mandarin/Singdarin to to Malay to English with a Singaporean accent, or a mix of all of the above (which is what I tend to do). I speak English without a Singaporean accent, but if I wanted to establish rapport quickly with a fellow Singaporean, I would use Hokkien or even Malay mixed with some Singlish but never just English! Our knowledge of these other languages is what makes us unique. This should be utterly fascinating to any serious academic interested in linguistic, but because it didn't suit Dr Tan's very simplistic narrative, she chose to just ignore it. If I was marking her essay, I would fail her for this gross oversight. Do your research properly next time!
Is there a debate to be had about this issue, about the relation between Singaporeans and their accent? Of course there is, it is a thoroughly fascinating topic for people who like linguistics. We could talk so much about how Singapore is a unique multi-lingual country that happens to use English as an official language: how in Singapore, it is paradoxically nobody's language and everybody's language at the same time. Yet Dr Tan's article was poorly written and stank of her own insecurities, it was one-sided and she didn't once try to consider a balanced argument. It read like a PAP propaganda piece, it was like someone gave her some money and told her to write a piece to make Singaporeans feel good about their culture. Despite her credentials, Dr Tan's article didn't come across as a serious discussion about this aspect of linguistics - instead, it was at best a poorly written piece of political propaganda, at worst, the rant of an insecure, unhappy woman (not unlike Auntie Hua). Oh dear Dr Tan, how do you account for this rather shoddy piece of writing? That's it from me on this issue - what do you think? How do you feel about the way Singaporeans speak? Do you have a Singaporean accent when you speak English? Have you met teachers like Dr Tan before and how do you feel about teachers like that? What do you make of Tom's accent? Do leave a comment below and many thanks for reading!
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