Ed: The following was drafted about a year ago and I never quite gotten around to finishing it until now. I’ve cut out a lot of what I had wanted to say, but the point still remains valid today.

When we consider the question of standard English what we find, in effect, is double standards. The very idea of a standard implies stability, and this can only be fixed in reference to the past. But language is of its nature unstable. It is essentially protean in nature, adapting its shape to suit changing circumstances. It would otherwise lose its vitality and its communicative and communal value. - Henry Widdowson, « jollypuddle

The Speak Better English month has just concluded itself - replete with the tagline “Be understood/not just in Singapore, Malaysia and Batam” - as part of the activities organized by the pernicious Speak Good English Movement.

After looking at the localized, spasmodic histrionics in the Singapore blogosphere over a ST letter by one Anthony Lee Mui Yu (see for example Fox Vixen for a copy), I cannot help but contrast the hairsplitting pettiness exhibited in such criticisms of Singapore English with the neutral, even curious tone in this IHT article.

“English has become the second language of everybody,” said Mark Warschauer, a professor of education and informatics at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s gotten to the point where almost in any part of the world to be educated means to know English.”[...]

As English continues to spread, the linguists say, it is fragmenting, as Latin did, into a family of dialects - and perhaps eventually fully fledged languages - known as Englishes.

[...] New vernaculars have emerged in such places as Singapore, Nigeria and the Caribbean, although widespread literacy and mass communication may be slowing the natural process of diversification.

[...] As a simplified form of global English emerges, the diverging forms spoken in Britain and America could become no more than local dialects - two more Englishes alongside the Singlish spoken in Singapore or the Taglish spoken in the Philippines. A native speaker of English might need to become bilingual in his own language to converse with other speakers of global English.

There’s an interesting bit that follows this passage speculating how English per se will not become the world’s lingua franca, but rather a austerely restricted subset that will be mutually intelligible across all speakers of all Englishes. Purists will be horrified at this fragmentation and mutilation of the English language, since it would finally force them to abandon the romantic fiction that the Queen’s English is the only “correct” version of the language, and also the astounding panoply of minutiæ that so many of them hoard to justify their claims of mastery, and in many cases seem almost trivial.1 On the contrary, the plurality of Englishes parallels the working nature of distributed version control systems - each person carries within himself or herself a working copy of the language, and the only criterion defining fluency is how well said person can communicate with another person who also carries within himself or herself another working copy. In this context, here’s the most interesting part of the IHT article:

A recent study found that the Queen’s English - the language as spoken by the queen of England - has evolved over the past 50 years, becoming slightly less plummy and slightly more proletarian. But the future evolution of the language, scholars say, is more likely to belong to the broken-English speakers of far-off lands.

“The people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it,” wrote the Indian author Salman Rushdie in an essay in 1991.

There is no doubt that the official disdain for our own patois is responsible for much of the lamentations that Singaporeans as a whole have horrible English. Yet our very own Singlish is rich enough to warrant its own dictionaries - even a full-blown lexicography2. As Fox once famously said: “Singlish also has its own grammar. Can anyhow use suffixes. MEH!”

And honestly, who cares how you say random names like Raleigh or Warwick or Gloucester? It’s really quite sufficient to just say it the way appropriate for an audience - Cambridge, MA is pronounced somewhat differently from Cambridge, UK, as is Berkeley, CA from Berkeley the Bishop - and after all, it’s not like you were asked to pronounce the name of the town Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.3

So why is it that we must feel obliged that we should be able to make ourselves understood by others, and not have others understand us as well? It may be a minor inconvenience for foreigners to understand our English, but at the same time, that’s what gives Singapore part of its charm. Embracing our idiosyncrasies does our society much greater justice than forever wishing for a romanticized notion of English As She Is Spoke4 .

References

  1. Seth Mydans, International Herald Tribune, Across cultures, English is the word, 2007-04-09.
  2. Anthony, Straits Times, Speak better English - let’s get it right, 2007-04-27.
Footnotes
  1. I will be the first, though, to admit that the conflation of “its” and “it’s” irritates the hell out of me. It’s amazing how prevalent, ’tis.↩
  2. Jack Tsen-Ta Lee, editor of the Singlish dictionary, is in need of an etymologist, a philogist, a grammarian and a phonetician. If you are interested, please answer his call.↩
  3. The correct way to pronounce this Welsh agglutination is given on the village’s website [wav].↩
  4. English As She Is Spoke, an anonymous pamphlet from 1883, is one of the funnier pieces of literature I have had the fun to read. Oestensibly a reader for Portuguese students of English, sample sentences include “This ink is white” and useful phrases include “Postilion! My horse has been struck my lightning!”↩