A linguistic introduction to the English language
English is spoken in large parts of the world, and many people consider it to be a global language.
While that statement isn’t exactly true, what gives rise to that impression, and what are the facets of that issue that make it more complicated than it may seem? Let’s compare the English language spoken in the United Kingdom to the case of one of its former colonies, the South-east Asian country of Singapore.
British English
British English refers to the English Language spoken and written in the United Kingdom. It is most commonly distinguished from its American counterpart in terms of pronunciation and spelling, such as “favourite” (UK) versus “favorite” (American). In the late 16th to early 18th century, the British Empire colonized many countries and brought their culture and influence to those parts, causing many of their former colonies to adopt English as their official language to this day.
Dialect
That being said, the notion of “Standard British English” might be misleading at first. That term is not to imply that everybody throughout the United Kingdom speaks the one and exact same way. Far from it, as the case of dialects, which are varieties of the language differing from Standard British English in regards to pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling and grammar. For example, Welsh English and Scottish English are dialects of Wales and Scotland, two different countries in the United Kingdom. In a previous blog article, I covered the difference between Mandarin Chinese and one of its dialects, Cantonese.
Accent
Often confused with the term “dialect”, an accent is actually one of its subsets. It is related to pronunciation or the way words of the English language is spoken. In England alone, one can expect to hear a different accent in a different city, from Exeter to Oxford to London. Speaking a dialect of English is not the same as speaking English. However, all sorts of people can speak English with different accents that indicate the place or country that they were brought up in.
Singapore English
Much like the UK, there exists a Standard Singapore English that is identical to the Standard British English. Promoted by the government and perceived by the general population as “proper English”, it is the form of English taught in classrooms and used for the transmissions of news and information in the country.
Pidgin
However, if you’ve ever been to Singapore, you may be surprised to find that the actual English spoken by the natives there differ greatly to Standard English. As the population of Singapore is made up of several races (Chinese, Malay, Indian) and great numbers of ethnic groups (Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, Mandarin Chinese, etc.), the first generation of English-speaking natives brought over vocabulary and grammatical structures from these other cultures into their usage of English, giving rise to a hybrid language containing elements taken from other languages and dialects — a pidgin.
Creole
A creole then refers to the subsequent iterations of said hybrid language as it gets passed down from one generation to the other — in essence developing its own native speakers. Singapore’s creole is called Singlish. It has a little bit of a contested status, as most people hold the perception that Singlish is improper or a marker of low social status — especially when compared to Standard English — but as times have changed, so has that conception. Nowadays, Singlish is now regarded as a valuable piece of both Singapore’s heritage and identity.
Interested to learn more facts about English? Check out our list for some English courses you can take!