Singapore has a "Speak Good English" campaign to convince its English-speaking citizens to drop the Singaporean dialect in favor of so-called standard English. But there's resistance! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...ood_English_Movement
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -J. Krishnamurti
Very interesting, Geoff. I have been thinking about Singapore lately as some of my colleagues are from there, and I've noticed in emails a bit of Singlish. I wondered what the history of their language is. I liked this quote from your link, Geoff:
quote:
While Singlish may be a fascinating academic topic for linguists to write papers about, Singapore has no interest in becoming a curious zoo specimen to be dissected and described by scholars
The problem I foresee in this movement is that without understanding what language is and how it works, they are condemned to failure in their endeavor. I would imagine that interference from Singlish could cause problems in texts that ought to be written in standard (UK?/International?) English. It could be that the writer only knows Singlish; in that case, they could not hope to write in standard English. It could be that they are not well educated in standard English. Those who have a good command of both Singlish and standard English can do what the rest of us do, choose a register based on the context and audience of the text. People do this sort of thing all the time.
This article inspired me to look up information about another outpost of spoken English, the dialect spoken on Orkney, which we visited a few years back. There, we met a man whom we could not understand at all. His wife, who was from mainland Scotland, could understand him, and our friends, from New Zealand, temporarily living on Orkney, could understand him a little. They explained to us that there was a Scandinavian influence on Orkadian English, and this man had been born and raised on Orkney. I found this website, which tells the history of Norn, the ancient variant of Old Norse that was spoken there centuries ago, and then these paragraphs, which would explain why our brains could not process what the man was saying. It was fascinating to listen to, even though we did not understand a word and spent our time with him just nodding and smiling like idiots.
quote:
But even after the complete demise of Norn, its remnants still live in the linguistic memory of Shetlanders and Orcadians. Their native Scots dialect has inherited a good deal of Scandinavian words (including pronouns, prepositions and particles), several grammatical traits and even intonation, which is said to be very reminiscient of Norwegian. Hugh Marwick and Gregor Lamb comment on the Orcadian accent with the following words:
The Orkney cadence is quite different from that of any part of the mainland of Scotland, and there is not the slightest possibility of confusing it with that of our nearest neighbour - Caithness. But on the other hand, a Norwegian in Orkney, listening to Orcadians talking among themselves at such a distance that only their tones were audible, might well imagine he was at home in Norway. It is one of the most remarkable things about speech that people of the same stock, living out of touch with each other, may become mutually unintelligible so far as vocabulary is concerned, and yet retain 'the tune they speak to' practically unchanged through centuries. Such has been the case in regard to Orkney and its motherland Norway. (Cited from "The Viking Legacy" (1971) by John Geipel, p. 105)
In Norwegian, the sentence 'I hope we can eat at eight o clock' is Jeg håper vi kann spise klokken åtte and it would be sounded with a similar lilt, going up and down just as in the Orkney dialect. ("Whit Like the Day? Understanding Orkney dialect." (2005) by Gregor Lamb, p. 96)
No "Speak Good English" campaign here. It was perfectly good English.
Wordmatic
Posts: 1390 | Location: Near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
I wonder if the long-lasting 'lilt' ("the tune to which they speak") has something to do with brain science. It's said that music/rhythm are stored in a different part of the brain from words & remembered far longer.
I saw this in action w/my MIL's Alheimer's. Even after she was beginning to forget how to walk, & hadn't talked for ages, she would chime right in [w/excellent pitch] on any tune she'd learned, whether something from her childhood in the 1920's, or from decades later. At the time I attributed it to a musical bent I'd never noticed during healthy yrs (she was active, no patience for sitting listening to anything). I'd thought my husband's musical gene came from his opera-loving dad's side only. Later learning the science I realized it might be a common phenomenon.
Posts: 2605 | Location: As they say at 101.5FM: Not New York... Not Philadelphia... PROUD TO BE NEW JERSEY!
WM, I'm surprised that the only Norwegian word I couldn't decipher is "spise." I used to work with Swedes, and learned a bit of it, so maybe that helped. The aspect of a language's rhythm is something I hadn't much considered, yet I'm aware of more and more Americans ending a declarative sentence with an upward inflection which heretofore had been reserved for interrogatives. I wonder where that's coming from?
As for where music is stored in the brain, this surely relates to why stutterers can sing without stuttering.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -J. Krishnamurti
