Singlish
Our "latest behaviour modification campaign" is classified under "Weird News" in Canada, and gets picked up by Dave Barry! Hur hur.
(The world's reaction in Dave's comments.)
I remember when we were younger, we had a rule around the house: anyone who ended their sentence with "lah" or "lor" would be fined ten cents each time they did that. Come to think of it, all the money was paid to the parents, and I don't remember them being penalised, even though I'm pretty sure they slipped up a couple of times.
There are two groups of people who speak Singlish: those who can comfortably switch between Singlish and grammatically-correct English, and those whose Singlish is a result of poor acclimatisation to the English language to begin with (because they come from a predominantly Chinese-speaking household, for instance). There's a reason why people go on immersion programmes when they learn a foreign language; sometimes the opportunity to speak it is just too limited.
I can't imagine that PM Lee has any problem with the first group; the problem with this "campaign" to eradicate Singlish is therefore that he seems to be addressing the second group, while treating them as if they were the first -- that they can drop their "'lahs' and 'lors'" at will, so to speak.
Even then: rap? Seriously? That's what's going to make us sound intelligible? And we had a campaign where we were urged to wave at fellow motorists? Really?
***
The Sunday Herald is very cool for giving away free books (in PDF) (via Boing Boing).
"'Speak in a normal Singapore tone, which is neutral and intelligible,' Lee Hsien Loong said. 'But speak in full sentences, with proper sentence structure and cutting out all the 'lahs' and 'lors' at the end of each sentence...
"[Singapore] is well known for its numerous social engineering campaigns, most of which are government-backed. Singapore in the past has urged its citizens to wave at fellow motorists, flush public toilets, be more romantic and arrive at wedding receptions on time.
"Lee urged teachers to use 'pop songs, hip-hop and rap as mediums for teaching good English.'
"'If our English becomes too mutated, then we become unintelligible to others,' he said. 'If we speak in a dialect which only some Singaporeans can understand, then we are handicapping ourselves and cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world.'"
-- "Singapore turns to rap and hip-hop," Cnews
(The world's reaction in Dave's comments.)
I remember when we were younger, we had a rule around the house: anyone who ended their sentence with "lah" or "lor" would be fined ten cents each time they did that. Come to think of it, all the money was paid to the parents, and I don't remember them being penalised, even though I'm pretty sure they slipped up a couple of times.
There are two groups of people who speak Singlish: those who can comfortably switch between Singlish and grammatically-correct English, and those whose Singlish is a result of poor acclimatisation to the English language to begin with (because they come from a predominantly Chinese-speaking household, for instance). There's a reason why people go on immersion programmes when they learn a foreign language; sometimes the opportunity to speak it is just too limited.
I can't imagine that PM Lee has any problem with the first group; the problem with this "campaign" to eradicate Singlish is therefore that he seems to be addressing the second group, while treating them as if they were the first -- that they can drop their "'lahs' and 'lors'" at will, so to speak.
Even then: rap? Seriously? That's what's going to make us sound intelligible? And we had a campaign where we were urged to wave at fellow motorists? Really?
***
The Sunday Herald is very cool for giving away free books (in PDF) (via Boing Boing).
posted by Laughingcow at 4:19 am
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