A brief history of the English language in Singapore

English came to Singapore when in 1819 Sir Stamford Raffles set up the first major British trade settlement there. Prior to that, English speakers had visited the island for purposes of trading and reconnoitering, but it was the arrival of Raffles that “began a formal connection with Britain which was responsible for the prominence that English has in Singapore today” (Gupta 1998: 106). Upon its arrival, the British administration encountered a ‘capitan’ system, which divided the society into three groups: Malays, Chinese, Indians, plus a capitan-less group of ‘others’, and each ethnic community had in effect its own legal system under the jurisdiction of its own ‘capitan’ (Bloom 1986: 352). This ethnically-based division was preserved by the British and till today, can be seen in Singapore’s policy of ‘multiracialism’ that underpins its current language policy.

The British were keen to cultivate a group of English-educated elites, and in 1870, produced young men “competent to earn a livelihood in Government and mercantile offices, but the majority of these clerks know only how to read, write and speak English imperfectly” (cited in Bloom 1986: 358). Crucially, however, English had been established as the language by which socio-economic mobility was to be attained, and by 1900, this group of elites had come to enjoy a much greater degree of English language proficiency and to also cover a much wider occupational range.

Alongside the more standardized variety of English taught in the schools, there also developed a colloquial variety, one which showed a high degree of influence from other local languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay and Tamil (Platt and Weber 1980: 18). The varieties of Malay most important to the development of the colloquial variety were Bazaar Malay (a simplified form of Malay then used predominantly as an inter-ethnic lingua franca) and Baba Malay, spoken primarily by the Straits Chinese. The Straits Chinese or Peranakans are of mixed (Chinese and Malay) ancestry. While they tend to see themselves as culturally and ethnically Chinese, they often use a variety of Malay as the home language.

As Gupta (1998: 109) points out,

These two contact varieties of Malay had themselves been influenced by the southern variety of Chinese, Hokkien. The lexical items in CollSgE which are not from English are overwhelmingly from Malay and Hokkien – contributed from these two varieties of Malay.

This colloquial variety also developed in the English-medium schools, though more in the playgrounds than in the classrooms. According to Platt and Weber (1980: 19):

The English-medium schools of Malaya and the Straits Settlements used English as the medium of instruction for all lessons and children were expected to speak English in the classroom. It is well known that children at many schools were expected to pay a small fine if caught speaking anything else. Furthermore, English was regarded as a prestige language, the way to better employment, the language which opened up knowledge of the Western way of life. In a situation like this, children often acquired some English from elder siblings even before commencing school, used it with other children at school and later on extensively in the Employment and Friendship domains …

This developing colloquial variety spread from the school playgrounds to the homes where

it became a more prestigious variety than the local colloquial ethnic variety spoken by servants, parents (especially mothers) and younger siblings. Younger siblings were impressed by the new language and, as mentioned before, they often picked it up well before entering school in the version transmitted to them by their elder brothers and sisters, and used it together at home and when playing with neighboring children.

(Platt and Weber 1980: 20-21)

A number of things from this brief historical sketch will be relevant in the rest of this overview: the classification of modern Singapore society along ethnic lines, the view of English as a language serving instrumental functions, and the status relation between the standard and colloquial varieties.