Reviewed by Colette van Kerckvoorde, Bard College at Simon’s Rock
As part of a new series on the dialects of English, this book offers a clear and concise introduction to the linguistic features of Singapore English. David Deterding describes the variety of educated Singapore English that is now emerging (and that is not to be confused with colloquial Singapore English, commonly known as Singlish). D is not trying to discover new patterns but instead presents and provides illustrative materials for features that are already widely known and discussed. The sample sentences in the book can be accessed as sound files on an accompanying website.
Based on the introductory chapter, it is clear that D writes for those without prior knowledge of the linguistic situation in Singapore. He provides a good overview of relevant facts and numbers for English use in Singapore, focusing on the island’s history and linguistic situation. The author then describes the sources for the linguistic data used in this volume, addressing their flaws as well as their advantages. Three kinds of data are used. Most important are the speech samples provided by a thirty-four year old ethnically Chinese female Singaporean undergraduate student who reports that English is now her best language. D describes this speaker, whom he calls Hui Min, as exceptionally clear and highly articulate and claims that her speech is distinctly Singaporean (8). Hui Min’s one-hour recordings provide a good basis for an analysis of the phonological features. In later chapters, an existing corpus, the National Institute of Education Corpus of Spoken Singapore English (NIECSSE), is used, as it provides more examples of syntactic and lexical phenomena particular to Singaporean English. Finally, several blogs are also used.
The second chapter deals with phonetics and phonology. In Ch. 3, morphology and syntax are addressed, while Ch. 4 contains a description of discourse and lexis. D provides good descriptions of the linguistic features and also gives an overview of recent research for those features that are most emblematic of Singapore English, e.g. the discourse particle lah is given ample attention. Ch. 5 further explores the recent history of Singapore English and highlights the government’s efforts in promoting English language use.
Chs. 6 and 7 contain resources that would be beneficial to the reader. In Ch. 6, D provides an annotated bibliography of the topics covered throughout the book. Ch. 7 contains the transcripts for the Hui Min data.
The author concludes that a mature variety of educated Singapore English with many particular features of speech is indeed emerging, though it can, of course, still be easily understood in the rest of the world.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the current development of World Englishes. D does not make any use of difficult or intimidating linguistic jargon, thus making this work highly accessible.