That Problematic Accent

Cambodia was a great country. Seeing Phnom Penh (a potential for visual overload), Pursat (a quiet village that can be circled under an hour with heavenly views), Siem Reap (mainly a tourist area for visitors to Wat Angkor) and Battambang (a quiet and chilly town that had a certain charm to it even in the quiet night) was a very refreshing experience.

Any visitor to Cambodia would notice that their language is different from ours. The Cambodian language, known as Khmer, is extremely nasal and has many vowel sounds that may sound like gibberish to the uninitiated. But one would be delighted to know that most people in Phnom Penh do speak some level of English so getting around is not that big a problem. However, don't expect the Queen's English. With a native tongue that sounds more whiny than Vietnamese or even Thai, the Khmer accent is equally hard to get used to.

But the Cambodians have a reason for speaking English with a Khmer accent, simply because their first language is Khmer. It was this that made me feel culturally impure when I spoke to Cambodians and related to them that our first language in Singapore is English.

Singapore is an awkward melting pot of cultures. The true inhabitants of the land are the Malays, adn the rest of us can safely be categorized under "immigrants". With a 75% Chinese population, most of us immigrants came from China, others from India and a handful of Europeans (and/or their mixed offspring). Needless to say, our forefathers came to Singapore speaking their native languages (or dialects). These included Cantonese, Hokkien, some Mandarin, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Spanish and Portugese. There was also a small community of creole speakers who spoke something called Bahasa Kristang (Language of the Christians). That was Singapore as recent as 60 years ago.

The government chose English as our first language. So though we have four National Languages, English was chosen as the language of commerce. Over the years, this has shaped Singapore into the way it is today. The reason why we are now a hub for so many industries is because we are, inter alia, an country that is accessible to all who speak English (which equates to most of the modern world anyway.

English has many different accents, even within England herself. A cockney speaker may not understand a Jeordie speaker, and that guy from Mersyside may sound like he was from a different country altogether. While the Queen's English is arguably the most authentic English, and also arguably the English that we take after as a result of us being a former Crown colony, the accent most comfortable to Singaporean ears is probably the American accent. About 90% of the shows that we watch on TV are American shows. British shows are hardly aired anymore. This causes a little bit of confusion in our tiny little island.

If you would just think back and ask yourself, "What English did I learn in school," you'd probably find yourself in a rut. Of the English teachers that I had, none were native English speakers (ie from England), but to the best of my memory, they spoke rather good English. Sure there were the odd few who had the residue of Chinese dialects in their English and some who insisted on wrong grammar but those were all reasonable mistakes that anyone would make in any living language. But if the English accent wasn't passed on to us by way of British English teachers, then just what accent do we have? Or more importantly, what accent are we supposed to have?

It all boils down to what we use English for. English is used to communicate with the world. However, it is by no means the most spoken language in the world. Millions of English speakers know English only because it is the most recent global lingua franca. So their accents vary from Latin influenced (ie Spain, Italy, Portugese), to Chinese influenced to Swahili influenced. So technically speaking, as long as your English can be understood by whoever you're supposed to communicate with, then it has served its purpose.

Which brings me to a statement that an angmoh in Cambodia made about the American accent. According to him, Cambodians spoke with a slight American accent because a lot of their tuition teachers are American. Another agreed and said that if you travelled to Singapore, all the girls there speak with an American accent as well. Sounds like good news? Not a chance in hell. His exact words following that were, "It's one hell of a turn off when you meet an Asian girl and she speaks to you in that American accent. It's just disgusting." I did not know where to put my face and continued packing my things, pretending that I didn't hear anything.

I would have approached the guy and asked him to rethink his statement and on hindsight, maybe I should have (if nothing more than for him to get a Singaporean perspective and maybe get me a few beers). But the reflex action to turn away was much stronger because I knew what he said to be true. More and more young people in Singapore have started speaking with that slight American twang. It first starts with the occassional rolled "r" behind words like "for" and "sure" and many more. Then it progresses to change the stresses of the syllables to make itself more and more parallel to the American accent. A smattering of words like "like", "for real", and "no shit" are also a part of this process.

You see, there is nothing wrong with trying to pick up an accent. I myself am a language buff and I've, on more than one occassion, pissed friends off by pestering them to teach me words and sounds in their respective languages. But the thing about it is, I will never speak as Tamil as fluently as a Tamil Indian, or Malay as fluently as a Malay, simply because I am neither Tamil nor Malay.

Singaporean English was never related to American English. The way our parents speak, the way our teachers speak, and the way our Ministers speak is, in every sense of the word, our very own Singaporean accent. The Singaporean accent, though similar to British English, is also influenced by our local languages. As a result, our "p" in "party" and "t" in "to" is slightly softer than in British English; the stresses we put on our notes, though again similar to that in British English, is less expressive because of the expression words we have like "lah, lor, hor, ah, uh" (which are in itself a very complicated matter to foriegners). Singaporean English never had a history of rolling the 'r' (perhaps with the odd case of the very purist Tamil who takes pride in that particular sound that no other language in the world other than Tamil has) simply because us Southern Chinese always had a problem pronouncing even the non-rolled 'r'.

In short, living languages like English change all the time. Accents change all the time. but such changes come at a natural pace and are usually due to foreign invasions or other more drastically natural events. Though the invasion of American TV into our homes is no less an invasion than one with guns and grenades, I think it is time to just stop and think. If we have the intellectual capacity to work on changing our accents to emulate the Americans, we should be able to just ask ourselves why we're doing that. Is it because it's cooler to sound like an American, or is it that usually unusual way that we Singaporeans like to fight back conformity with?

Whichever reason it is, it's time to stop fooling ourselves. America is a great, fun and free country with wild parties and a cool accent. But we will never ever be Americans. Not by changing our accents anyway. If we'd just look within our country and culture, we'd realize that our accent really doesn't sound too bad. After all, who else in the world can speak with a Singaporean accent better than us Singaporeans?

So you thought that messing up your stresses and rolling your 'r' would lift you up in the eyes of the people of the world?

Don't be stupid.

Don't be disgusting.

Think of what that angmoh guy in Cambodia said.