'There is still life in the old grey mare although she ‘ain’t what she used to be!’ : Peranakan English – Evolution and authenticity

Abstract

Descendants of 18th/19th-century southern Chinese seafaring traders in Southeast Asia and local women, the Peranakans can be viewed as a China-West locus for language and culture. The evolution of their linguistic repertoire involved the development of their vernacular, Baba Malay, a restructured Malay variety with Hokkien influence, with a subsequent shift by early/mid-20th century to English as their dominant language, as a consequence of their social, economic and political status, their being a prestigious and privileged group with pro-British alignments and access to English education. This paper describes Peranakan English (PerE) in Singapore – which has received little attention (except e.g. Lim 2009, 2010) – whose noteworthy features in spoken and written genres include: (a) aspects of the linguistic system that approximate standard British English more closely than contemporary Singapore English, e.g. consonant and vowel realisation, word stress patterns, classic English idioms and archaic turns of phrase; and (b) more vernacular features, e.g. Topic-Comment structure, reduplication, code mixing with Baba Malay/ Hokkien. The recognition of such linguistic variation is significant in the study of New Englishes for several reasons: (i) it provides us with appreciation of the contact dynamics in the formation of New Englishes in the diverse, highly multilingual contexts of Asia, (ii) including the influence of the community’s original vernacular BM via PerE on the emergent Singapore English, demonstrating the persistent influence of a founder population’s features in an ecology; (iii) it is revealing of the identity alignment practices of the community as subjects in a complex, changing sociolinguistic context. Finally this paper examines the current positioning of the Peranqkans in their 21st-century cultural revival, where the linguistic features used in intra-community dialogue as well as representations for a wider audience, e.g. the portrayal of Peranakans in popular culture, raises questions of authenticity and the commodification of language and identity.