The curious case of nomenclatures

Abstract

When it comes to Englishes in Singapore, two terms come to the fore: Singapore English, and Singlish. As part of the methodology and motivation for this paper, I compiled 500 published works on Englishes in Singapore ranging from the 1970s to 2021. These published works include monographs, edited volumes, chapters in edited volumes, and articles in major peer-reviewed journals. 85% of the 500 publications used the term Singapore English, 27% of them had Singlish, and only a mere six publications (around 1%) used the term Singaporean English. One would expect that for a term that speaks of and to the being of the nation, the term Singaporean English would certainly be used with far more frequency. This is especially so when there is in fact nothing morphologically awkward in attaching the suffix -ean to ‘Singapore’. There are immensely more examples of Englishes around the world that have the suffix (or its near equivalent) than those without (American, Tanzanian, South African Englishes are just some of numerous examples); and the two well known Englishes that remain suffix-free are New Zealand English and Hong Kong English, which we can explain by way of a morphological misfit: the -er suffix does sound rather awkward. Since Singapore does not have this problem, why then does Singapore English resist the suffix -ean?