Simi, the Singaporean version of Siri

More Siri stuff. But since I'm in Singapore, I thought I'd blog about a clip from the mrbrown show that's been making the rounds among Singaporeans (and fans of Singlish). By the way, simi is Hokkien for 'what?' The uploader of this particular video on Youtube was also kind enough to provide a transcript of the dialogue:

I found the clip hilarious and thought I should make some comments on the language used, for the sake of my non-Singaporean linguist friends. I'm certainly no expert on Singlish (having done any personal research on the subject), but I will say that Simi's speech corresponds to a 'basilect' form of Singaporean English, which is what most people would call 'Singlish', as spoken by an ah beng 'an unsophicated Chinese boy, usually Hokkien' (as defined by TalkingCock.com).

You can find the ubiquitous sentence-final particles, including the (in)famous lah, but also other particles like ar, leh, one, what and the question particle meh. The Wikipedia article on Singlish provides a neat summary of the various particles found in Singlish, though I think they need to provide a bit more contextual evidence especially since the use of most particles is governed by context and pragmatics.

I myself should pay more attention to the use of particles in Singlish (and more standard varieties of English for that matter), as they often help me analyse particles used in languages I study. In addition to the particular context that the particle occurs in, there's usually an emotional connection with its use that's difficult to define. Speakers will often say things like a sentence / utterance 'sounds better' with a particular particle, or that the presence of a particle makes the speaker sound either more or less 'angry' or 'surprised' or 'timid' etc.

Some other grammatical features characteristic of Singlish: copular verbs (e.g. 'to be' and its forms 'is', 'are', 'am') are typically dropped before adjectives, e.g. Migrate better lah!; The CTE jam from Ang Mo Kio to Orchard Road (my intuitions tell me that jam here isn't being used as a verb). Plurality isn't usually marked on nouns with a suffix but with a quantifier like so many, e.g. got so many Bangla and PRC come and take your job and make your MRT so crowded.

You also find a few 'typically Singlish' words / expressions used, like tahan 'to endure' (from Malay) and atas 'snobbish' (lit. 'upstairs') (from Malay), as well as sibei jialat (from Hokkien) - sibei 'very' and jialat 'f*cked' (okay not quite, it literally means 'to eat strength' in Hokkien - maybe kinda like Mandarin 吃苦 'to bear hardship', lit. 'to eat bitterness').

One expression I wasn't familiar with was: why you fly my aeroplane? I had to look up the TalkingCock.com entry to learn that it means 'why are you standing me up?'. To fly aeroplane also corresponds to the Hokkien pang puay kee? but the origin of this phrase is indeterminate.

(The transcriber wasn't able to / didn't want to make out the name of the restaurant at 3:13 in the video. It's actually called the 'Ku De Ta Restaurant', located at on the roof of the new Marina Bay Sands hotel - or 'Coup d'état Restaurant', another not-so-subtle hint of subversion by the awesome mrbrown show.)