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Resemblance by meaning and culture between Singapore English and Singapore Mandarin

  • Jock Wong

    Jock Wong teaches at the Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore. His teaching and research interests include semantics, pragmatics, intercultural communication, Singapore English, and language pedagogy.

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Published/Copyright: May 15, 2024
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Abstract

Resemblance between languages could be due to relatedness in terms of etymology. Varieties of the same language or dialects resemble one another in many ways because they are related. The languages within a language family, descendants of a common ancestral language, also resemble one another in some ways. To contemplate resemblance between two languages, one could consider their mutual intelligibility or other kinds of formal similarities. For example, while the Chinese languages are not mutually intelligible, they exhibit very similar grammatical patterns. They are all tonal and share a largely common writing system. This paper, however, proposes another way of appreciating language resemblance. It has been observed in the Singapore context that when two different languages, English and Mandarin, are adopted by a community of speakers as dominant languages, over time, the two languages become nativized and resemble each other in terms of meaning, ways of speaking and the cultural values they embody. The Singaporean bilingual speakers in question are offspring of people from Southern Chinese culture who, as recent as a few generations ago, spoke neither English nor Mandarin as a dominant language. This paper presents evidence to show how Singapore English and Singapore Mandarin, which are mutually unintelligible, may resemble each other in terms of meaning, ways of speaking and cultural values.


Corresponding author: Jock Wong, Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore, E-mail:

About the author

Jock Wong

Jock Wong teaches at the Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore. His teaching and research interests include semantics, pragmatics, intercultural communication, Singapore English, and language pedagogy.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Kit Mun Lee, Brian Poole and Lauren Sadow for reviewing an earlier version of this paper and giving me comments. Lauren Sadow generously gave me suggestions from an NSM perspective.

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Published Online: 2024-05-15
Published in Print: 2024-06-25

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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