English Portfolio Entry no, 5

Pub Date: 25/07/2007 Pub: ST Page: H4
Headline: Speak Good English drive to rock to a youth beat
By: HO AI LI
Page Heading: HOME
Source: SPH

IT’S all about expressing yourself well – including how to “tell your girlfriend or mother that you love her” – says musician Jack Ho, 29, from Singapore band EIC. He is among the musicians – including band mate Rai, 29, and The UnXpected’s Shirlyn Tan, 31 – who have been roped in as “activists” for this year’s Speak Good English Movement. In an effort to get closer to youth, the campaign has made the Timbre Music Bistro – where local bands play – the official venue for its activities. Live band and drama performances and oratorical contests will be held at the popular Armenian Street hangout from 7 to 9pm every Wednesday for the next year.

The movement, in its seventh year now, will commence with the launch of two books next Tuesday. The first is a compilation of the “English As It Is Broken” columns in The Straits Times and in the paper’s Web portal Stomp. The second is a retailer’s guide to good English titled Speak Well, Sell Well. Chairman of the movement, Professor Koh Tai Ann, an English literature academic at Nanyang Technological University, said it is focusing its efforts on youth. She said: “It’s better to get people when they are young. The young will be the future teachers, future parents, future workers.”

She believes that speaking good English is not about the right accent or Singlish, but about pronunciation and being grammatically correct. Instead of making Singlish our national language, we can claim ownership to Singapore Standard English, she argued. There are varieties of Standard English in other countries spoken in a local accent, and containing accepted words for local concepts. “Where the British have mobiles and the Americans cells, Singaporeans have handphones,” she said. Prof Koh said that the movement’s progress is “very difficult to quantify” but “slowly accumulative”. She added: “If we keep it going we are bound to see results.”

Spik-oot Eenkrish

I am no pessimist, but to me the words “slowly accumulative” ring with the same relevance that the words “utterly futile” have.

The “Speak Good English” movement, after seven years, has faded into the background din of our everyday lives as yet another bit of Government-sponsored tinsel and thunder.

There are several reasons I believe that the movement, inclusive of this recent change, will fail.

Right from the very beginning of a Singaporean’s education, he or she is subjected to lots of badly pwonunced, grammatical wrong Eenkrish. My mother is the HOD of English at a primary school, and she (and I) can readily testify to the fact that many of the teachers of English at primary schools are hardly able to pronounce words correctly and with grammatical precision. I remember with much chagrin how my Primary 5 form teacher would always pronounce the word “film” as “filem”, its Malay equivalent, and how she staunchly ignored me when I tried to correct her. (When you are Primary 5, correcting your teacher’s pronunciation seems like a much more significant usurping of divine order than correcting certain discipline masters and science teachers in secondary school.)

So right from the very beginning, the students are led into the illusion that such English is the internationally accepted, correct form of standard English. Such influence even persists well into secondary school, (Ahem) where admittedly the standard of spoken English is still much higher.

Another reason I think the movement will fail is because it implicitly compels people to give up Singlish. MM Lee himself has also condemned the use of Singlish. I think an important clarification in my stand on this issue has to be made here.

I like Singlish.

In fact, I think that Singlish is one of the extremely few uniquely Singaporean aspects of our culture.

Yes, be shocked, stunned, horrified, call this blasphemy and banish me from Lit RA.

But I think there is nothing at all inherently wrong with Singlish. Language is for communication, and how correct a language is not something that can be measured on an absolute scale, as language is ultimately relative to its usage. What is wrong now may now be what is right tomorrow; after all, the mere fact that a word appears in a dictionary does not mean that any word not inside is necessarily wrong. This is precisely why the word “kiasu” in now in the Standard Oxford Dictionary. Does this mean that the word “kiasu” went through a miraculous change in status overnight? No. For all intents and purposes it is still used the same way—only that now our English teacher has no right to underline the word should it appear in a passage of text. And we still cannot imagine a Brit saying to another Brit with a Brit accent: “I never really liked him, he was always too miserly and kiasu for me.”

Because Singlish fulfills its purpose of communication in a Singaporean context very well, if not superbly so, I say: treasure it. When I looked through the Wikipedia article on Singlish, I felt a guilty sense of pride in Singlish and genuine interest the extremely complex phonetic dissection of Singlish, and the way it serves very interestingly as a cultural linguistic melting pot; an ethnolinguist’s dream. After all, what makes a Scottish Accent, a Texan Drawl, a French Slur “acceptable”, but not Singlish?

However, I believe that Singlish is not alone sufficient for the average Singaporean to build a good future for himself or herself. This is because even though we would not ask for a kopi teh in perfect Queen’s English, neither would we want to answer interview questions or discuss business contacts in speech peppered with lahs and lorhs and random speckles of meh? Hence I believe that the Singaporean must effectively learn two types of English—Singlish, and Standard English, and also master the art of code-switching. A tall order, but nonetheless one that I believe solves one of the most aching problems of the Speak Good English campaign; that of forcing a person to give up the means of communication he has lived and grown familiar with.

It is at this point that I realize how hard it is to put into words this factor is; it’s rather like your Chinese teacher forcing you to speak Chinese with a Chinese accent. (unlike English, Chinese is a pitch-based language, and the accent directly affects pronunciation the same way speaking Standard English would be different from speaking Singlish, so this should be analogous) There is a vague and unsettling sense of unfamiliarity and un-selfness about the whole affair. It is because of this that I believe that the Speak Good English movement should not be one that attempts to condemn Singlish at the same time. Let people first know that Singlish is not wrong; then let them know the multifarious added benefits of Standard English; then the problem will be solved.

And now that the youth are being looped into this campaign too, will things change? They, but not, in my opinion, to any significant extent. Why? Simply because any such move will be simply seen as contrived and artificial, the same way we see all the happily running and jumping construction workers in cheesy national day music videos. The Singaporean Government has severely underestimated the effect that culture can have on such movements. And for such a movement which has so severely estranged itself from the common coffeeshop Singaporean, attempts like these cannot have significant impact. To the normal coffeeshop Singaporean, Standard English has become the language of the bourgeoisie, of stiff-necked politicians who talk in terms they cannot understand and are discouraging the use of the very dialects that these people speak anyway. When they see such a move, they think: what are they doing to the youth now?

So my advice is this: don’t let the rift grow, don’t fight what little Singaporean culture we have. Stop hacking the ground out from under your feet, because when you sling mud you get your hands dirty.