The choice of Singlish – the most b

The choice of Singlish – the most basilectal register of English spoken in
Singpore by a majority of Singaporeans as first or second language – may be at
first glance somewhat puzzling: Is it indeed the most illustrative example of an
Asian English variety or is it actually the odd one out? The answer is both, depend-ing on our definition. Singlish is the only restructured Asian English vernacular
to be thoroughly described to date, and it is the only variety of English acquired
as primary language by its speakers. Other varieties, such as Malaysian English,
have been so far mostly observed in terms of reductionist accounts (i.e. what is
(not) there in terms of English grammar, see Baskaran 2008) and thus appear to
reveal only a mild degree of restructuring (Platt & Weber 1980; Schneider 2007).
While Hong Kong English may well display distinctive phonological features (see
Bolton 2003 for an overview), there is very limited evidence to suggest that we
are looking at a distinct Asian variety in grammatical terms (Schneider 2007: 138;
but see Gisborne 2009). A clearly restructured variety can be found in Chinese
Pidgin English, where abundant Cantonese grammar mixed with predominantly
English lexical sources, but here we would be looking at a now extinct pidgin, a
code once used in a restricted context, rather than a New Asian variety (Matthews
this volume; Ansaldo, Matthews, & Smith, forthcoming). In a sense then, Singlish
is not merely an L2 variety and is not representative of the use of English in most
Asian societies. From the point of view of language contact, however, Singlish is
the best possible case study, as it is the one variety of English that clearly recom-bines grammatical elements of other languages, i.e. Sinitic and Malay, into a novel
grammatical profile (Ansaldo 2004). It is in this sense that, if we want to look at
English in contact with Asian typologies, there is no better place to look than
Singlish.