This paper investigates a previously unexamined aspect of Colloquial Singapore English which I call Mock Singlish–supposedly innocuous renderings of an imagined variety of Singlish in mocking discourses. These pseudo-Singlish features hinge from the grossly exaggerated hierarchical ordering of the prestigious Singapore Standard English (SSE) and state-denigrated, “corrupted” Singlish and are found online in parodic voicings of discontent often presented in a humorous frame. Building on previous research on linguistic mock varieties, which have primarily attended to their role in discourses of ethnicity or racism (Hill, 1998), this paper demonstrates how Mock Singlish is appropriated by local Anglophone elites to discursively construct vernacular identities to (re)formulate dominant-subordinate class distinctions, and as an ideological tool for projecting counter-hegemonic stances.To analyze this process, I adopt Agha’s (2007) “emblematic figures of identity” as a key concept and as the following research questions: How is Mock Singlish used as a semiotic resource to index and (re)construe figures of identity? How do these discursive figures represent the dissenting practices online?
Data for this study come from five YouTube videos featuring local Anglophone elites and coded to extract language and behaviour pertaining to the construction of emblematic figures (‘Ah Beng’: a type of uneducated/uncultured hustler; ii.‘heartlander’: a particular notion of the local who lives in public housing, associated with lower income and speaks Singlish/dialects, 'kopitiam'(coffeeshop) uncles: middle-aged men engaged in collective idling and vernacular discussions).
Findings show that ideological fractalization effects in Singlish produces Mock Singlish, which affords performers symbolic power that rationalizes and reinscribes the stratification produced by Singapore’s language policies. Emblematic figures and the social markers that constitute them (i.e. class position, language use, demeanour etc.) are re-invoked through ironic performances and the manipulation/exaggeration of associated metapragmatic features, thereby reinterpreting traditional readings of these social types to construct an authorial stance that negotiates a new, counter-hegemonic social position, such that Mock Singlish gains symbolic value as a resource for voicings of dissent, deflecting state scrutiny in the authoritarian city-state.
References:
Agha, A.(2007) Language and Social Relations. Pennsylvania: Cambridge University Press
Hill, J.(1998) Language, race, and white public space. American Anthropologist 100(3): 680-689
