Singapore is a multi-ethnic society with four official languages: Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, and English, now the most common home language (Department of Statistics Singapore 2015). The extent to which ethnic distinctions in... [ view full abstract ]
Singapore is a multi-ethnic society with four official languages: Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, and English, now the most common home language (Department of Statistics Singapore 2015). The extent to which ethnic distinctions in Singapore English (SgE) are changing is under debate, with some arguing that SgE exhibits increasing ethnic differentiation and others claiming that differences are decreasing due to declining use of ethnic languages (Deterding 2007; Tan 2012). As Singaporeans shift to English, speakers may avoid non-normative features perceived to result from transfer from ethnic languages; at the same time, these marked features may become increasingly salient indices of ethnic identity.
This study examines the pronunciation of (r) in the English of Tamil Singaporeans. While SgE generally uses approximant /ɹ/, Tamil Singaporeans have been observed to use tapped /ɾ/ or trilled /r/ (Sng 1986). The present analysis of Tamil Singaporean English reveals a dramatic shift towards mainstream SgE in apparent time, with speakers in their 50s using only 13.9% approximant /ɹ/ but those in their teens and 20s using 91.7% /ɹ/. Moreover, participants vary by speech context; speakers use significantly fewer approximants in the condition that highlights Tamil Indian culture. This is particularly true for younger speakers, who use tapped/trilled /r/ only in the Tamil Indian cultural condition.
Aside from supporting the notion that ethnic differences in SgE are declining, these findings also suggest that features such as tapped/trilled /r/ are increasingly used to highlight ethnic identity in Singapore.
References
Department of Statistics Singapore. 2015. General Household Survey 2015. URL: http://www.singstat.gov.sg/publications/publications-and-papers/GHS/ghs2015. Accessed August 14, 2017.
Deterding, David. 2007. The vowels of the different ethnic groups in Singapore. In David Prescott, Andy Kirkpatrick, Isabel Martin, and Azirah Hashim (eds.) English in Southeast Asia: Literacies, literatures, and Varieties. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press. 2-29.
Sng, Keow Hong. 1986. Some phonetic properties which may distinguish Tamil, Chinese and Malay speakers of English in Singapore each other. B.A. Thesis for the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore.
Tan, Ying Ying. 2012. Age as a factor in ethnic accent identification in Singapore. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 33(6). 569-587.
