Singlish: Creole, creoloid, creolized language?

Today's post is brought to you by "ongoing problems with terminology in linguistics".

As my newsfeed this week has filled up with reblogged and retweeted articles about Singlish, often the first thing that gets mentioned is that Singlish is an English-based "creole". But what exactly does the term creole mean?

In many introductory linguistics textbooks, dictionaries and the Wikipedia entry (at the time of writing), the term creole (or creole language) is mostly commonly defined as a stable natural language that has developed from a pidgin, while pidgin is typically defined as a simplified contact language developed to enable speakers of different languages to communicate.

In other words, a pidgin is said to become a creole when children learn it as their first language and the new language develops its own set of rules and conventions - its own grammar. That means that languages which have "Pidgin" in their names, such as Hawaiian Pidgin, are by this definition actually creoles.

Pidgin on the street?

The issue with this particular definition of creole, when applied to Singlish, is that there is no attested "pidgin" state for Singlish. I've seen a few sources (including the Wikipedia article) that claim that Singlish arose from a pidgin-like English as non-English speakers started to "pick up" the English that was filtering out "into the streets" from English-medium schools established by the British.

This story is problematic because, as most Singaporeans of my parents' generation will recall, prior to the implementation of post-independence language policies, the main lingua franca used between speakers of different languages was not English, but a simplified form of Malay known as Bazaar Malay. In a 1975 article (behind a paywall), John Platt, who was an Associate Professor at Monash University, noted that even at the time of the paper's writing, people with little education would speak a pidgin English only when communicating with tourists, and that outside of areas frequented by tourists, many older people spoke no English at all. Rather, he suggested that:

[Singapore Colloquiul English's] existence can be traced to the transference of certain features from the languages of local ethnic groups to the English acquired by school children in primary and secondary schools. These transferred features were then reinforced by the use of this variety (particularly its basilect, SCE) in informal situations at school and at home among siblings. 

Consequently, Platt used the term creoloid¹ to describe a language variety that has not developed from a pidgin, but nevertheless shares a number of grammatical features with known creoles, such as fewer verbal inflections (or more generally, a loss of morphology). Specifically, he was applying this term to the basilectal form, or the most colloquial / informal register of Singapore English. For instance, in this form of Singlish, you don't need to have 3rd person agreement with most verbs: he say 'he says'.


Simplifying or making things more complicated?

Although the term creoloid hasn't gained a lot of currency in creole studies, it is worth noting that this may be because the term creole itself has expanded in meaning beyond "a language that comes from a pidgin". There is much more recognition that all languages are mixed to some extent, and that what we have been previously identified as creoles, may have been the result of speakers of a language shifting rapidly to another one. For instance, in their 1980 book Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics, Thomason and Kaufman, distinguish creolized pidgins (creoles that have developed from pidgins), from languages that have undergone changes to their grammar and vocabulary as a result of different degrees of intensity in language contact. They use the term abrupt creolization to describe the outcome of one extreme of the continuum, where there has been intense contact that results in very rapid language shift.

(This leads to the potentially confusing situation where one might use the term creolization to either refer to: the process of a language gaining structure and complexity as it transitions from a pidgin to a creole; or the process of a language losing structure and complexity, when compared to the target language, as adult speakers rapidly shift to the language.)

In any case, we note the inclusion of Singlish in the online Atlas and Survey of Pidgin and Creole language structures (APiCS). However, the editors explicitly state in that in the absence of clear criteria to define pidgins and creoles, their approach was to try and include as many languages as they could which represented the kinds of contact languages that linguists were interested in.

So yes, Singlish is a creole, creoloid and creolized language. But that depends on how you define the terms creole and creolized. It is no longer fair to assume that a creole only refers to a language that came from a pidgin. And maybe that's something that needs to be addressed in textbooks and other sources of linguistic information.

Also, this is the tip of the terminological iceberg - there are other terms around like post-creoles and mixed languages that I don't have the time, energy or qualifications to talk about!


¹Although the Platt article appears to be the first published use of the term creoloid, Loreto Todd presented a paper titled "Pidgins and creoles: The case for the creoloid" at the International Conference on Pidgins and Creole in Honolulu that same year.

References
Michaelis, Susanne Maria & Maurer, Philippe & Haspelmath, Martin & Huber, Magnus (eds.) 2013. Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://apics-online.info.)

Platt, John T. 1975. The Singapore English speech continuum and its basilect 'Singlish' as a 'creoloid'. Anthropological Linguistics 17(7): 363-374.

More Singapore English words in Oxford English Dictionary

The BBC just covered this story: Singapore terms join Oxford English Dictionary, which is basically about how Singapore English words like wah and shiok get to join their linguistic compatriots lah and kiasu in the OED, the world's "definitive record of the English language".

There's even a little quiz at the bottom of article for those of you who want to flaunt your Singlish.

However, I was drawn to the opening line of the article, which I think continues to perpetuate the myth of how words end up in the OED (and many dictionaries in general):

Several Singaporean and Hong Kong English terms, including "wah", "shiok" and "yum cha", are now officially recognised as acceptable English.

By saying that these new words are "now officially recognised as acceptable English", the BBC article continues to perpetuate the myth that the job of the OED is to be the judge of what is acceptable or not acceptable English, and that it serves as the standard which English (or at least British English) speakers can fall back on to check if a word exists, and to see if they or other people are using it in the "correct" way. And while there are many languages that have organizations that regulate their use, English is not one of them.

A quick look at the OED FAQ site, where they answer the question "How does a word qualify for inclusion in the OED?" provides us with the following statement:

The OED requires several independent examples of the word being used, and also evidence that the word has been in use for a reasonable amount of time. The exact time-span and number of examples may vary: for instance, one word may be included on the evidence of only a few examples, spread out over a long period of time, while another may gather momentum very quickly, resulting in a wide range of evidence in a shorter space of time. We also look for the word to reach a level of general currency where it is unselfconsciously used with the expectation of being understood: that is, we look for examples of uses of a word that are not immediately followed by an explanation of its meaning for the benefit of the reader. We have a large range of words under constant review, and as items are assessed for inclusion in the dictionary, words which have not yet accumulated enough evidence are kept on file, so that we can refer back to them if further evidence comes to light. (bold emphasis added)

Vague as the statement is, the criteria for entry are more or less about the frequency of use of a word and its intelligibility. Nowhere do we see the term "acceptable" - although the notion of "general currency" implies that there has to be some kind of social agreement to use a word in a particular way.  The BBC's use of the word "acceptable", in conjunction with "officially recognised", also makes it very difficult to ignore the connotations of social prestige, formality and flaunting one's class and education - all of which have little to do with how a word gets into the OED.

Rather, the OED is a descriptive dictionary that serves as a repository of the words (past and present) that are or used to be in circulation within the different pockets of the English speaking world, much like the Coxford Singlish dictionary (pictured below) is a repository for all kinds of Singlish terms used at the time of publication (and earlier) in Singapore. Of course, the OED is also historical in that it maintains a list of obsolete words, as well as obsolete meanings of words.

The Coxford Singlish Dictionary (edited by Colin Goh and Y. Y. Woo) 

Of course, just as people may assume prisoners are guilty simply because they are in prison, once a word enters the OED, it may eventually gain the kind of acceptability or prestige that people assumed it needed to get in there in the first place.


(Addendum: as much as this post was about the descriptive nature of the OED, and how it isn't intended to be used as a prescriptive tool, I cannot ignore the power that is often ascribed to dictionaries. For speakers of non-prestigious minority languages and language varieties, the very existence of a dictionary in their language or variety is a mark of status: the dictionary not only validates the words they speak, it validates their entire language as something worthy of speaking and studying.)