Article published in:
The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and beyond
Edited by Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber and Alexander Kautzsch
[Varieties of English Around the World G49] 2014
► pp. 401–419

Yesterday’s founder population, today’s Englishes

The role of the Peranakans in the (continuing) evolution of Singapore English

This paper highlights a less well known player in the contact dynamics involved in the evolution of Singapore English (SgE): the Peranakans – descendants of 18th / 19th-century southern Chinese traders in Malaya and local women, who became a prestigious minority group. As multilingual, early English adopters, and dominant in the ecology, the Peranakans demonstrate the significance of a founder population, in how their features – here, their original vernacular Baba Malay via Peranakan English – are persistent and influential in the evolution of contact varieties in a multilingual ecology. This paper also considers the current positioning of the Peranakans in their 21st-century revival in the changed sociolinguistic context of Singapore and what this means for the current and future evolution of SgE.
Keywords: Baba Malay, ecology, ethnolinguistic vitality, evolution, founder principle, language contact, multilingualism, New Englishes, Peranakan English, prosody, revitalisation, Singapore English, tone
Published online: 12 September 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g49.23lim
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