Week 3 – Language
Although English is the official language, the population is a majority Chinese. This makes it a little cumbersome as an Asian American because conversations always get initiated in Mandarin (I’m from the southern China, so Cantonese is my parent’s native dialect). Most of the time I default to English and it usually works out, though occasionally he/she needs to ask someone else to help out. Food stalls have numbers listed next to items which make things super easy to order.
The United States is unusual in the sense that most people don’t really make small talk to strangers; this is no different in Singapore, where it’s a mind-your-own-business attitude society. I haven’t had the chance to talk to many locals, but my meetup with some locals was no different from hanging out with my friends in the States. We were playing board games and were all having a good time.
Singlish, in terms of pure vocabulary, isn’t very different from American English outside of lah, leh, lor. Those are put at the end of the sentence for emphasis (e.g. See lah. See what I’m talking about?). The main difference is sentence structure. Conversations are very quick with short sentences that omits words and messes with the flow. At first, it may sound like “broken” English, but in reality it’s just an accent with a bunch of other language of the region mixed in together. Nonetheless, I didn’t have trouble understanding Singlish as an American.
