My idea is to create a Singlish (Colloquial Singaporean English) bot that tweets Singlish expressions.

An example of a tweet from the bot would be: “Wah! Raining again today lah!. No money so must still take bus to campus loh!”

This bot could be used for a course in linguistics, literature or even cultural studies.

Rationale

As a Singaporean, I feel that Singlish, our vernacular variety of English, is an important part of our identity and culture. Being a multi-racial country, Singlish has helped bring our people together and blurred the lines of extremely (in my opinion) divisive bilingual policy. Here is a funny video of non-Singaporeans sportingly attempting to speak Singlish.

Video 1: Swerve Community. (2015, November 12). Foreigners try and speak Singlish! [Video].   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2zmCgmDVqk

All Singaporeans are expected to learn English, for instrumental reasons, and a state-assigned Mother Tongue, for cultural purposes. English is the only common language across all the major races (Chinese, Malay, Indian and Eurasian) but is not considered a Mother Tongue for political reasons. Tan (2014) provides a fairly in-depth discussion of this topic.

Additionally, the government has actively promoted the use of Standard English over Singlish, with nation-wide programmes such as The Speak Good English Movement (n.d) that was launched in 2000. Singlish is viewed negatively by the state and former Senior Minister Goh (as cited in Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, 1999) even called it a “corrupted form of English”. Nonetheless, many Singaporeans have adopted Singlish as the variety of the heart and a key identity marker.

Many of my international students have found Singlish to be baffling at first but rather amusing and even endearing. I believe that it is important for a country to retain its unique identity, especially in the face of globalisation. With education being increasingly digital and more courses becoming blended, international students are receiving lesser interaction time with locals. This would deprive them of a richer educational experience.

As an applied linguist (by training), I am also worried about the possibility that the rise of new technologies may accelerate the endangerment or extinction of regional varieties of English. Internationally, native-speaker varieties of English (e.g. American English, British English) are viewed as more prestigious than local or non-native varieties (e.g. Singapore Standard English, Hong Kong English) (Crystal, 2003). This socio-stratification also occurs at national levels as Received Pronunciation has been historically seen as the variety of prestige. It is not uncommon or unheard of for a student to select an institution over another simply because the former is perceived as more prestigious. Ceteris paribus, and with universities offering more and more online options, students might just pick, for example, a British or American university over a Singaporean one because of the perceived prestige of the teacher’s accents.

(@Huw – would this be a good dissertation question? It allows me to marry my applied linguist background with the themes covered in this MSc in Digital education.)

Therefore, this bot could promote and reinforce the teacher’s cultural identity online.

Moreover, if ‘contact works in multiple ways’ (Bayne, 2020), then this Singaporean bot would allow international students the opportunity to have contact with a digital Singaporean and Singlish.

Ethical considerations

I can think of two possible problems with this bot. Firstly, as seen in the example post above, the bots could portray the Singaporean identity in a negative light. Without a good understanding of Singaporean humour or culture, a non-Singaporean could formulate negative assumptions of Singaporeans. The second problem could be the spreading of fake news, or at least false information.

References

Week 5: (Activity) Singlish Bot / Illyas Lim Effandi / An introduction to digital environments for learning (2020/2021)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0