Yesterday’s founder population, today’s Englishes: The role of the Peranakans in the (continuing) evolution of Singapore English

Abstract

This paper highlights a less well known player in the contact dynamics involved in the evolution of Singapore English (SgE): the Peranakans – descendants of 18th / 19th-century southern Chinese traders in Malaya and local women, who became a prestigious minority group. As multilingual, early English adopters, and dominant in the ecology, the Peranakans demonstrate the significance of a founder population, in how their features – here, their original vernacular Baba Malay via Peranakan English – are persistent and influential in the evolution of contact varieties in a multilingual ecology. This paper also considers the current positioning of the Peranakans in their 21st-century revival in the changed sociolinguistic context of Singapore and what this means for the current and future evolution of SgE.