Singapore is a diverse city-state that has attracted many foreign workers in recent years. Children of these expatriates attend both private international and local government schools. In accounting for the sociolinguistic development of such children, we must consider that Singapore differs from conventional second dialect acquisition settings in that it is positioned in the ‘Outer Circle’ of English; while orientation towards local norms is increasing, Singapore English (SgE) is still perceived to lack full legitimacy as a native variety, relative to Inner Circle varieties such as Australian English (Park & Wee 2009). In light of this status, questions arise as to whether expatriate children are acquiring features of SgE.
This investigation draws on data from 41 children, contrasting Singaporeans in local schools, Expats in local schools, and Expats in international schools. Our analysis focuses on the deletion of -t/d in final consonant clusters, a feature typical of SgE (Gut 2007).
Expat children in international schools are found to delete -t/d at a level comparable to British English speakers (Tagliamonte & Temple 2005). In contrast, while Expats in local schools perform equivalently to international school students in read speech, their spontaneous speech deletion rate is midway between those of international school and Singaporean students. Mixed-effects modeling of internal linguistic factors reveals that the differences between international and local school Expats are restricted to contexts following nasals and sibilants, the two most frequent subtypes of -t/d cluster.
The distinctive pattern observed among Expat children in local schools suggests that, rather than adopting or rejecting SgE, these children are hybridizing various Englishes in socially appropriate ways, using Inner Circle patterns for formal contexts such as reading aloud and approaching SgE patterns when conversing spontaneously.
Gut, Ulrike. 2007. First language influence and final consonant clusters in the new Englishes of Singapore and Nigeria. World Englishes 26(3). 346–359.
Park, Joseph Sung-Yul, & Lionel Wee. 2009. The three circles redux: A market-theoretic perspective on World Englishes. Applied Linguistics 30(3). 389–406.
Tagliamonte, Sali & Rosalind Temple. 2005. New perspectives on an ol’ variable: (t, d) in British English. Language Variation and Change 17(3). 281–302.
