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Part of
English in the Indian Diaspora
Edited by Marianne Hundt and Devyani Sharma
[Varieties of English Around the World G50] 2014
► pp. 105–130

Imperfectives in Singapore’s Indian community

| University of Freiburg
| Kings College London

This chapter examines the sociolinguistics of the Indian community in Singapore, with a particular emphasis on the use of the -ing marker among Tamils. The Indian diaspora in Singapore is of interest because the community differs from others in many respects: although a minority of less than 10 percent, Indians enjoy constitutional recognition, primarily through the use of Tamil as one of the four official languages. Furthermore, they are a firmly established ethnic group within the country, both socially and economically, having been instrumental in early colonial times and during the foundation phase of present-day Singapore English. Our study, drawing on data collected from 96 informants coming in equal parts from the Tamil, Chinese, and Malay communities, investigates the use of ­over-extension of -ing as a marker of all imperfectives, including statives and non-delimited habituals. We found the Tamils rating -ing as acceptable significantly more frequently than the other two groups in the case of statives and non-delimited habituals. As this parallels the Tamil aspectual system, our findings strongly support a substratist explanation for the Indian Singapore English aspect system.

Keywords: ethnic variation, Indian diaspora in Singapore, Singapore English, sociolinguistics of Indian Singaporeans, Tamil
Published online: 28 August 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g50.06lei
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