Postracial Policing, “Mother Tongue” Sourcing, and Images of Singlish Standard

Abstract

After decades of denigration and targeting by the state, Singlish—or Singaporean Colloquial English—has come into its own as a “uniquely Singaporean” phenomenon (Wee 2018), both a source and site of projects of raciolinguistic value-creation (Rosa and Flores 2017). Today, Singlish is often presented as emblematic of broader “racial harmony” among Singapore’s four official races, yet it has also become an arena for articulating and rejecting critiques of racialized Chinese-Singaporean majoritarian privilege. This paper analyzes interviews with literary producers, public presentations by artists, and published mediatized texts in which Singlish comes into being as a site of ideological contestation. It describes two contrastive figures and the discourse registers through which they are materialized: first, postracial policing, voiced as an insistence that Singlish is sui generis, and second, “Mother Tongue” sourcing, voiced as an insistence on adherence, in spelling and pronunciation, to the racialized “Mother Tongue” varieties (and their racialized speakers) from which Singlish items are sourced. I argue that these two figures and enregistered positions co-participate in the production of an image of standard: a felt sense of standard-likeness that emerges as an effect of aesthetic textuality (Nakassis 2019), even in the absence of overt standardization projects.