Singapore is a small island at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, and it was originally populated by Malays. After a British trading post was established there in 1819, many of the traders who arrived were from different Chinese ethnicities: Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka, Hainanese. Some also came from India and Sri Lanka, especially Tamils. By the early 20th Century, there was a pidgin used in trading, but it wasn’t based on English or Chinese – it was called Bazaar Malay.

Education was not universal; the better-off families paid to send their children to English-speaking schools to advance their career prospects, and it was in this context that the seeds of Singlish were sown. Singlish didn’t show up first as a pidgin, a lingua franca used in trade. It came about as an adapted version of English used by students in English-language schools who spoke other languages at home. Which means that from the beginning, it had the air of ‘not-quite-right’ English, a version that the students knew wasn’t ‘proper’ – but was functional and had more cultural connection for them.

Lah lah land

After World War Two, universal free education was instituted in Singapore, and starting in the 1960s it was provided on an ‘English plus mother tongue’ basis: the students would take their classes in English, plus a class in one of the three mother tongues of Singapore – Malay, Tamil, and Chinese (‘Chinese’ in this case meaning not Hokkien or Cantonese but Mandarin: the most prestigious kind, and the most useful for business).