© Columbia University Press
Singapore English
Paper, 160 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-2545-1
$34.00
December, 2007
Cloth, 160 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-2544-4
Edinburgh University Press
$100.00
Over 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.