Singapore EnglishOver the past few decades, Singapore English has been emerging as an independent variety of English with its own distinct style of pronunciation, grammar and word usage. This book provides an overview of this variety in straightforward, non-technical language, including coverage of: * its pronunciation, including comparisons with the pronunciation of English in other countries in South-East Asia* its morphology and grammar * the words that are used, including instances where the meaning is distinct from other varieties of English * the discourse patterns that are found, including use of particles such as lah* its history and current developments.All the findings presented in the book are illustrated with extensive examples from one hour of recorded conversational data from the Lim Siew Hwee Corpus of Informal Singapore Speech, as well as some extracts from the NIE Corpus of Spoken Singapore Speech and recent blogs. In addition, usage patterns found in the data are summarised, to provide a solid foundation for the reported occurrence of various features of the language. A full transcript of the data is included in the final chapter of the book |
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Common terms and phrases
actually and basically American English blogs British English British or American Chapter common corpus data for Hui dental fricatives Deterding discourse particles discussed educated Singapore English English in Singapore ethnically Chinese example fact final full vowel function words glottal stop guess Gupta HM Int HM Hokkien Hui Min instances Int HM Int intonation kiasu Kusu Island language laughs lexical Low Ee Ling magazines Malay Malaysia Malaysian English Mandarin maths mean monophthongs niece and nephews NIECSSE data nouns nowadays null-subject structures occurs OK lah past-tense Phonetics pitch Poedjosoedarmo present tense primary school pronoun pronunciation reduced vowel refer seems Singapore English Singaporeans Singlish sisters Speak Mandarin Campaign speaker speech of Hui stressed suffix syllable syllable-based rhythm talking teaching things tokens tone topic prominence Triphthongs usage utterance varieties of English variety of Chinese verbs yeah