Tone in Singlish

Substrate features from Sinitic and Malay

Lisa Lim

This paper focuses on aspects of tone in Singlish, the (mesolectal/basilectal) variety of English spoken in Singapore, which take up the claim of tone being a marked feature in contact varieties. While the source of tonal properties may well be the dominant Sinitic substrates, the actual patterning, at both word and phrase level, would appear to actually be a consequence of prosodic patterns found in another, non-tone language substrate, Bazaar/Baba Malay. Such observations support the notion of the founder population in the ecology paradigm: This paper suggests that, as the early English speakers in Singapore, the Peranakans, with Baba Malay as their vernacular, may well have been the community of speakers whose influence on Singlish has been most significant and persistent.

Keywords: Baba Malay, Bazaar Malay, Cantonese, Hokkien, Singapore English, Singlish, tone

Published online: 17 February 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.95.16lim

Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Goh, Robbie B. H.

2016. The anatomy of Singlish: globalisation, multiculturalism and the construction of the ‘local’ in Singapore. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 37:8 ► pp. 748 ff.

Lim, Lisa

2016. In Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger [IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society, 42], ► pp. 283 ff.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo

2021. In Variation Rolls the Dice [Contact Language Library, 59], ► pp. 243 ff.

Ng, E-Ching

2012. Chinese meets Malay meets English: origins of Singaporean English word-final high tone. International Journal of Bilingualism 16:1 ► pp. 83 ff.

Wee, Lian-Hee

2019. In Phonological Tone,

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