Tien, Adrian (2014). Chinese-based lexicon in Singapore English, and Singapore-Chinese culture. In Maria Grozeva-Minkova, & Boris Naimushin (Eds.), Globalisierung, interkulturelle Kommunikation und Sprache (pp. 473-482). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Also published as:
Tien, Adrian (2014). Chinese-based lexicon in Singapore English, and Singapore-Chinese culture. In Ewa Zebrowska, Mariola Jaworska, & Dirk Steinhoff (Eds.), Materialität und Medialität der sprachlichen Kommunikation – Materiality and mediality of linguistic communication (pp. 411-422). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Singapore sits at the crossroads between the East and the West, and its “unofficial” national creole, Singapore English (or “Singlish”), attests to the diverse linguistic and cultural amalgam consisting of primarily English and Chinese and, secondarily, Malay and Tamil. While English grammar serves as the backbone of Singlish, its lexical composition is strongly represented by loanwords or calques which originated from Chinese – not only Standard Mandarin but also Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and Hakka dialects. These Chinese-based words in Singlish lexicon are worth studying because they demonstrate that the Singapore culture is both uniquely native and historically as well as culturally reflective of Chinese culture. To further substantiate the case, we examine a selection of cultural key words from Chinese-based Singlish lexicon using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) model as advanced by Wierzbicka and Goddard over the last 40 years. By using a set of 60 or so semantically unanalysable “primes”, this model allows us to decompose the complex meanings of cultural key words into configurations of semantic primes, thus making it possible to study, compare, and explain these words.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
