Multilingual Mediators: The Role of the Peranakans in the Contact Dynamics of Singapore

Abstract

The Peranakans – descendants of 18th/19th-century southern Chinese seafaring traders in Malaya and local women, who then became a prestigious, privileged minority group in the Straits Settlements with pro-British alignments and access to English education – are well placed as a locus for contact dynamics in a diverse, multilingual context. Their linguistic repertoire initially involved the development of their vernacular, Baba Malay (BM), a restructured Malay variety with Hokkien influence (Ansaldo and Matthews, 1999). The early/mid-20th century then saw the acquisition of and, often, shift to English as their dominant language, a consequence of their social, economic and political status. Peranakan English (PerE) displays vernacular features reflecting Malay and Sinitic, e.g. Topic-Comment structure, reduplication, and code mixing with Baba Malay/ Hokkien (Lim, 2010). This paper suggests that a recognition of the role of the Peranakans’ positioning and multilingual repertoire is instructive in appreciating language contact in Singapore, in particular the evolution of Singapore English (SgE). SgE tends to be documented as showing influences from the more dominant – economically, numerically – language( s) in the ecology, viz. as having extensive Sinitic influences. For instance, SgE displays Sinitic-type tone in its prosody (Wee 2008; Lim 2009). However, while in all other New/ learner Englishes with tone language substrates the usual pattern is for high tones to align with accented syllables, SgE’s prosody by contrast is consistently word-/phrase-final-prominent. Such a prosodic pattern is also found in PerE, which in turn is found in BM (and other Malay varieties) (Lim, 2011). It is this confluence of factors – the Peranakans as a group being (i) multilingual, (ii) early English adopters, and (iii) dominant in the ecology – that supports the argument for the influence of their vernacular BM via PerE on the emergent SgE, demonstrating the significance of a founder population’s features as persistent and influential in a multilingual ecology.