Resemblance by meaning and culture between Singapore English and Singapore Mandarin

Abstract

Resemblance between languages could be due to relatedness in terms of etymology. Varieties of the same language or dialects resemble one another in many ways because they are related. The languages within a language family, descendants of a common ancestral language, also resemble one another in some ways. To contemplate resemblance between two languages, one could consider their mutual intelligibility or other kinds of formal similarities. For example, while the Chinese languages are not mutually intelligible, they exhibit very similar grammatical patterns. They are all tonal and share a largely common writing system. This paper, however, proposes another way of appreciating language resemblance. It has been observed in the Singapore context that when two different languages, English and Mandarin, are adopted by a community of speakers as dominant languages, over time, the two languages become nativized and resemble each other in terms of meaning, ways of speaking and the cultural values they embody. The Singaporean bilingual speakers in question are offspring of people from Southern Chinese culture who, as recent as a few generations ago, spoke neither English nor Mandarin as a dominant language. This paper presents evidence to show how Singapore English and Singapore Mandarin, which are mutually unintelligible, may resemble each other in terms of meaning, ways of speaking and cultural values.