The State of Singlish
Oh well, I have been ranting about this for quite a while...
Frankly, the key reasons for the State of Singlish, and the pidgin Mandarin we speak, are:
1) Jack Neo's GaoXiaoXingDong - contaminating two decades worth of children who grew up with the numerous Singlish expressions from his iconic characters. We applauded his genious and observational powers at that time. On hindsight, that was the beginning of the rot. Imagine the impact and linguistic influence upon the children who grew up with the 5 consecutive nights of his GXXD over the stretch of many years. (Perhaps, Jack Neo and co. did a great disservice to our nation, notwithstanding his Public Service Medal.)
2) Gurmit Singh, Andrian Pang, Mark Lee and the many other emcees and comperes on the mediacorp TV channels and Radio stations, who perpetuated Singlish and mangled English these many years. (In fact, I should be directing all the fault-finding towards Mediacorp instead, rather than these minions of the company.)
3) We the people. We the English speaking people. We the Mandarin speaking people. We the supposedly educated and informed people, who argued once upon a time that Singlish, being our de facto lingua franca (and I am damn proud of Singlish too), should be embraced by all, because we can code-switch afterall. We have forgotten that young children are not as capable of code switching as adults, and they need constant GOOD models of language in action. And we the people - parents, maids, passers-by in the market and NTUC, interviewees in national news programmes etc - are all guilty of being TOO LAZY to speak good standard English (or Mandarin as well).
So, our generation, and our subsequent generations, will not be able to out-talk the very effective and persuasive/loud speakers (people) from the West (U.S., U.K.) and the East (China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan.) If we cannot persuade, if we cannot communicate effectively (not to even consider our utter lack of general knowledge and perspectives), we would have failed as individuals and as a society.
Frankly, the key reasons for the State of Singlish, and the pidgin Mandarin we speak, are:
1) Jack Neo's GaoXiaoXingDong - contaminating two decades worth of children who grew up with the numerous Singlish expressions from his iconic characters. We applauded his genious and observational powers at that time. On hindsight, that was the beginning of the rot. Imagine the impact and linguistic influence upon the children who grew up with the 5 consecutive nights of his GXXD over the stretch of many years. (Perhaps, Jack Neo and co. did a great disservice to our nation, notwithstanding his Public Service Medal.)
2) Gurmit Singh, Andrian Pang, Mark Lee and the many other emcees and comperes on the mediacorp TV channels and Radio stations, who perpetuated Singlish and mangled English these many years. (In fact, I should be directing all the fault-finding towards Mediacorp instead, rather than these minions of the company.)
3) We the people. We the English speaking people. We the Mandarin speaking people. We the supposedly educated and informed people, who argued once upon a time that Singlish, being our de facto lingua franca (and I am damn proud of Singlish too), should be embraced by all, because we can code-switch afterall. We have forgotten that young children are not as capable of code switching as adults, and they need constant GOOD models of language in action. And we the people - parents, maids, passers-by in the market and NTUC, interviewees in national news programmes etc - are all guilty of being TOO LAZY to speak good standard English (or Mandarin as well).
So, our generation, and our subsequent generations, will not be able to out-talk the very effective and persuasive/loud speakers (people) from the West (U.S., U.K.) and the East (China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan.) If we cannot persuade, if we cannot communicate effectively (not to even consider our utter lack of general knowledge and perspectives), we would have failed as individuals and as a society.
posted by edwinheng at 9:40 pm
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