This chapter extends the discussion of multilingual development to the so-called New Englishes as symbolic systems that developed in the former colonial territories and continued to develop after the collapse of the British Empire – or the withdrawal of the United States in the case of the Philippines – in the newly created independent polities. More precisely, the focus here lies on outer circle Englishes in the sense of Kachru (Reference Kachru, Quirk and Widdowson1985), thus excluding the inner circle countries where English is extensively used as a first language and where monolingualism in English is extant (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States). The New Englishes will be analyzed from the perspective of their surrounding multilingual ecologies and not, as is more customary, in terms of hermetically delineated national varieties of English such as Indian English, Malaysian English, Singapore English, and the like. On that account, the chapter focuses on recent – and also more historical – multilingual outcomes of globalization where English plays a prominent role, has been incorporated into the local ecologies, interacts with many other languages, and shows or is beginning to show traces of localization or nativization. The chapter thus brings together the key issues discussed in the preceding chapters – globalization, migration, urban areas, multilingual advantages or effects, cross-linguistic influence, language acquisition and learning, language policies, identities, and attitudes – and pivots them on contexts of particular prominence.
Chapter 6 also affords additional perspectives: besides individual and societal multilingualism, it probes into multilingual interaction including intercultural communication. Detailed information will be presented from Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Gulf Region (especially the United Arab Emirates), as these have formed the research interest of the author for several years (Leimgruber, Siemund & Terassa Reference Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa2018; Siemund Reference Siemund and Dehors2018a; Siemund & Leimgruber Reference Siemund and Leimgruber2021; Siemund & Li Reference Siemund, Li, Ziegeler and Zhiming2017, Reference Siemund, Li, Klöter and Saarela2020; Siemund, Al-Issa & Leimgruber Reference Siemund, Al-Issa and Leimgruber2021; Siemund, Schulz & Schweinberger Reference Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger2014; Siemund et al. Reference Siemund and Leimgruber2021). Following an overview of the multilingual ecologies that English is embedded into (Section 6.1), the Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes (Schneider Reference Schneider2003, Reference Schneider2007) as well as the World System of Varieties of English (Mair Reference Mair2013) are discussed in relation to migration, multilingual language ecologies, and continuing language contact (Section 6.2).
Sections 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5 then scrutinize the multilingual ecologies of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai in more detail, bringing together aspects of historical and current societal multilingualism. They all define the Englishes encountered in these locales, but crucially also the other languages. Recent data from Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates help to appreciate the relevant multilingual ecologies and the role that English plays within them. The Gulf Region in particular offers a context where English – including the New Englishes – continues to be transplanted into. In the resulting language ecologies, these varieties of English interact in an unforeseen intensity and have now come together in what can be called a global dialect laboratory. Relatively newly developed contexts such as the Gulf Region mirror Singapore and Hong Kong in their early colonial stages when English came to be used as a lingua franca in a multilingual setting. The internal complexities of the new multilingual ecologies, however, are significantly higher with many more languages interacting in relatively small territories such as the United Arab Emirates. The fundamental principles, nonetheless, can be taken to be similar, so that the current situation in the United Arab Emirates provides important clues to the multilingual ecologies in Singapore and Hong Kong during the early colonial decades. All in all, Chapter 6 offers a systemic view of multilingual ecologies and works towards an operationalization of the factors that define them.
6.1 The Multilingual Ecologies Embedding the New Englishes
Besides Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Gulf Region, which represent the primary interest of this chapter, New Englishes that meet the present definition can be found in several African countries, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Fiji. English was implanted into these regions through colonial expansion and largely came to be adopted as a second language, partially also as a first language. The resulting varieties of English are known by such labels as Fiji English, Ghanaian English, Indian English, Malaysian English, Nigerian English, Pakistani English, Philippine English, South African English, and the like.
These varieties of English have been extensively researched, more recently by means of large corpora reflecting the use of English in the relevant countries (see the references in Kortmann et al. Reference Kortmann, Burridge, Mesthrie, Werner Schneider and Upton2004 as well as Siemund Reference Siemund2013).Footnote 1 However, current research provides overarching generalizations that are likely to play out quite differently at the local and individual level. This is due to three reasons.
First, the communities speaking these varieties of English have always been extensively multilingual. Colonialism penetrated into linguistically diverse areas in which knowledge and use of several languages used to be the norm.Footnote 2 Moreover, at least some colonies rapidly developed into major targets of migration shortly after being established. They were in need of cheap labour attracting people from far away speaking different languages. To complicate the picture further, indentured labour, especially from Southern India, added to the already existing multilingual texture in other colonies (e.g. in Fiji, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Africa).Footnote 3
Second, political borders were created rather artificially following colonial rule, not infrequently cutting across ethnic and linguistic groups. The idea of finding one variety of English to the left of a political border and another to its right cannot be but an oversimplification. What matters is the speech community, and this should be the unit of investigation (Schneider Reference Schneider2003: 273). On a similar note, urban centres tend to be different from the other parts of a country. English in Lagos is likely to be quite different from what is generally referred to as Nigerian English (Schreiber Reference Schreiber, Odoje, Obot, Beyer and Kramer2012).
Third, global migration is widely perceived of as flowing from developing to developed countries, silently passing over the fact that there is also extensive migration in the developing world. Expanding urban areas such as Accra, Lagos, Mumbai, Bangalore, Manila, and Cebu are as much targets of migration as are Toronto, London, and Dubai. They are densely populated linguistic melting pots with English being part of the mix.
The following observations can help to substantiate the above points. As for societal multilingualism, Table 6.1 offers a snapshot of the number of languages in a range of countries in 2021, based on the information provided by Ethnologue (Eberhard, Simons & Fennig 2022).Footnote 4 They bear witness to impressive degrees of multilingualism, especially in regard to India, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Tanzania.
Evidently, such figures need to be interpreted with care, as the distinction between languages and dialects is diffuse and Ethnologue does not systematically distinguish between indigenous and immigrant languages – although there is the category “non-indigenous.” Moreover, the figures in Table 6.1 do not necessarily reflect the most recent information. Accordingly, they sometimes under-report languages, while over-reporting in other places. The figures for India, Nigeria, and the Philippines look impressive, but many languages are rather small and restricted to specific areas or islands. Crucially, the figures do not reflect the time of colonization. Singapore perhaps had fewer than twenty-four distinct languages in 1819, while Hong Kong likely counted more than seven in 1841.Footnote 5 We will come back to these issues in the subsequent sections. In sum, the New Englishes typically emerged and continue to emerge in territories and contexts that are characterized by strong degrees of multilingualism.
Concerning varieties of English in relation to current political divisions, one could alternatively postulate macro-units like West Africa, East Africa, a super region comprising India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, as well as one consisting of Singapore, Malaysia, and parts of Indonesia, where the Englishes in use show important commonalities and could be conceptualized in terms of dialect continua. The dendrograms provided in Nagy et al. (Reference Nagy, Zhang, Nagy and Schneider2006), Schmidtke and Kuperman (Reference Schmidtke and Kuperman2017) as well as Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann (Reference Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann2008) offer some support for such a view, although further work is needed here. In a similar vein, classificatory labels like ‘Indian English’, ‘Nigerian English’, ‘Philippine English’, ‘Singapore English’, and the like are quite misleading in that they pass over variability in the representations of these Englishes in different locales of the same country or within unrelated speaker groups, but also in that they convey a degree of stasis that these Englishes simply do not possess. Ironically, the linguistic field of World Englishes has unconsciously contributed to the codification of these varieties, but given current globalization and migration processes, any such assumptions regarding stability are questionable. We need to factor in extensive fluidity (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010; see also Johnstone, Andrus & Danielson Reference Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson2006 on enregisterment).
Finally, with respect to migration within the territories where the New Englishes are spoken, recent figures suggest extensive internal population movements. For example, the Policy Brief on Internal Migration in the Philippines (UNESCO 2016b) states that “[a]pproximately 2.9 million Filipinos changed residence between 2005 and 2010,” but that the share of international migrants contributed only 4.2 per cent. Not surprisingly, the lion’s share of internal migration went to Metro Manila and the adjacent regions of Calabarzon and Central Luzon. One may suspect that people migrating to more prosperous international destinations induce flows of migration at home from rural to urban areas. As for Malaysia, internal migration accounted for 88.7 per cent of all migration (UNESCO 2016a). Amongst the most prominent destinations is the southern state of Johor which borders on Singapore. There is substantial daily commuting between its capital Johor Bahru and Singapore. I take it that similar data could be compiled for New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Accra, Banjul, Lagos, Nairobi, Dodoma, and others. Again, English can always be assumed to be part of the linguistic repertoire of these internal migrants.
6.2 Multilingual Strands, Migration Strands, and Transnational Migration
The New Englishes introduced above are characterized by differing degrees of nativization or endonormative stabilization in the sense of Schneider (Reference Schneider2003, Reference Schneider2007), but they nevertheless remain embedded in their respective local multilingual ecologies with which they continue to interact and in which they develop further. The New Englishes have in fact been appropriated by the local populations and have become part of the local ecologies. It may seem odd to consider English an African or Asian language, but current realities suggest such an analysis. And although New Englishes as such have received extensive scholarly attention, much less is known about their interaction with and their embedding in the local multilingual textures (Leimgruber, Siemund & Terassa Reference Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa2018; Siemund, Al-Issa & Leimgruber Reference Siemund, Al-Issa and Leimgruber2021; Siemund, Schulz & Schweinberger Reference Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger2014). Schreiber (Reference Schreiber, Odoje, Obot, Beyer and Kramer2012) describes impressive internal differentiation and social stratification for the English in Lagos.
In systematically distinguishing between “settler strands” and “indigenous strands,” augmented by various “adstrate strands,” the Dynamic Model proposed in Schneider (2003, 2007) takes the discussion of World Englishes significantly beyond Kachru’s (Reference Kachru, Quirk and Widdowson1985) division into inner, outer, and expanding circle Englishes or that between English as a native, second, or foreign language. The development of the New Englishes in colonial and postcolonial settings can be conceptualized as complex language contact situations in which indigenous and settler strands converge over time and together forge a new variety of English. According to Schneider (Reference Schneider2003, Reference Schneider2007), postcolonial Englishes traverse through five distinct stages, namely (i) foundation, (ii) exonormative stabilization, (iii) nativization, (iv) endonormative stabilization, and (v) differentiation. Due to important differences in the demographics, the languages involved, the acquisition processes, the communication patterns, migration patterns, attitudes and social evaluations, this general unidirectional process has led to unique outcomes depending on the postcolonial setting considered. For example, Schneider (Reference Schneider2003) sees Fiji English in stage two, Hong Kong English in stage three,Footnote 6 and Singapore English in stage four. Irish English can be considered one of the earliest postcolonial Englishes and has been nativized to an extent that as of today it is hardly recognized as such and typically classified as an inner circle English. Nevertheless, it is full of Irish traces and since Irish is the first official language of Ireland – though it is not widely spoken – it remains in contact with it.Footnote 7 It should be clear that the rather abstract classification proposed by the Dynamic Model passes over important local differences and variation. Some age groups and social groups in Singapore can be expected to be in stage three, others in stage four, and yet others perhaps even in stage five. It could also be possible that individuals traverse through these stages in the course of their lifetime.
Furthermore, in the typical colonial and postcolonial setting, there is not only one indigenous strand but several (see Schneider Reference Schneider2003: 243). What is more, the individual indigenous strands are composed of multilingual individuals. To complicate matters further, there may be local lingua francas, such as Bazaar Malay in Singapore and Malaysia, enriching the repertoires of the multilingual speakers. Accordingly, the indigenous strands are highly heterogeneous. Apart from the largely monolingual stage five Englishes in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where the indigenous strands have strongly diminished, the New Englishes considered here have become part of the language repertoires of the multilingual speakers in the relevant areas. The aim of the following sections lies precisely in making these multilingual strands and the local language ecologies explicit.
It is usually possible to associate the postcolonial Englishes with a particular developmental stage in Schneider’s (Reference Schneider2003) Dynamic Model. However, recent targets of international migration where English comes to be widely adopted as a lingua franca, such as the Gulf Region, largely eschew a classification in this model. The United Arab Emirates, for example, is an independent country that attracts foreign labour to drive local infrastructure projects. There is no immediate colonial power taking English to the area, although the Arabian Peninsula has a long history of English. In fact, the power relations are here reversed. Moreover, foreigners outnumber local Emiratis by factor ten (see Chapter 1 and Section 6.5). English is used because it is the global lingua franca and incoming workers and professionals speak it as a second language – partially also as a first language. The driving force behind English is globalization, not colonialism. In spite of important parallels in the genesis of other New Englishes, such situations necessitate different models. Migration strands – often themselves multilingual – complement and even outweigh the earlier indigenous and settler strands. As a matter of fact, the development of English in at least Singapore and Malaysia equally cannot be understood without factoring in the relevant migration strands (see also Chapter 7). They deserve attention in the historical reconstruction of these varieties.
Mair (Reference Mair2013), building on de Swaan’s (2001) World Language System (see Chapter 1), proposes the World System of Standard Englishes shown in Figure 6.1 that captures the hierarchical relationship behind World Englishes and likely paths of mutual influence (typically top-down). American English is considered the current hub variety providing a normative orientation for the other varieties. The super-central varieties could also be described as epicentres in their respective regions of influence (Mair Reference Mair2013: 259; see also Peters Reference Peters, Hoffmann and Siebers2009).
Figure 6.1 The World System of Standard Englishes according to Mair (Reference Mair2013: 261).
Mair (Reference Mair2013: 264) then goes on to include non-standard varieties into this model with the interesting consequence that non-standard varieties like African American Vernacular English and Jamaican Creole, amongst others, form a layer of non-standard super-central varieties. Jamaican Creole even ranks above the corresponding standard variety of Jamaican English. The motivation behind this ordering is that these varieties carry high covert prestige and exert strong global influences on specific cultural domains, such as music, entertainment, and media. Crucially, English as a lingua franca appears amongst the non-standard super-central varieties, which explains why it becomes the preferred medium of communication in migration contexts such as the United Arab Emirates.
However, although Mair’s (Reference Mair2013) model captures important dependencies between different varieties of English, it does not incorporate their embedding in the local multilingual ecologies and the concomitant linguistic influences. For the context of Singapore, for example, we need a model that captures the interaction between Standard English, Standard Singapore English, Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), as well as the mother tongues and the other languages active in the area. In historical terms, all languages in the territory, except for Malay, count as immigrant languages.Footnote 8 Further differentiation appears necessary, as Colloquial Singapore English is not homogenous across ethnic groups (see Section 6.3.3).
6.3 Singapore and Singapore English
Both laypeople and specialists widely consider Singapore as the archetype of a multilingual society. There can be no doubt that this description is adequate for the foundational decades of the then British colony. However, due to fervent governmental intervention and language planning, Singaporean society has been moving towards individual bilingualism. More recently, we see a trend to espouse English as the most dominant language in peoples’ language repertoires.
6.3.1 Historical Multilingualism
Separated by the Strait of Johor from the Malaysian peninsula, Singapore is a small island close to the equator in the Northern Hemisphere. There still are noticeable stretches of rain forest and wetland that can be taken to have been the primordial state before Sir Stamford Raffles arrived in 1819 and envisioned a special position for the location as a trading post in the British Empire. It is safe to assume that nobody then foresaw the ensuing population movements and especially the linguistic developments. It took about 200 years for Singapore to mature into the current super-diverse high-tech conurbation. Needless to say, its current linguistic texture cannot be understood without an appraisal of its early decades.
In the centuries before the British arrival, population density in Singapore can be assumed to have been relatively low with people engaging in fishing, agriculture, and trading. Malay will have been spoken, most certainly in various dialectal forms. It is reasonable to believe that there was trade and migration between and across the adjacent archipelago. One can further assume that contact with people from Southern China enjoys a long history in the area, with there being extensive trade networks spanning the South China Sea (Lim Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010; Siemund & Li Reference Siemund, Li, Klöter and Saarela2020).Footnote 9 The fact that Malaysia holds a strong Muslim population bears testimony to the extensive cultural and commercial networks operating in and beyond the area centuries before the British (and other Europeans) arrived.Footnote 10 Moreover, it is important to view Singapore in the context of previously established European trading posts such as Penang and Malacca. These European posts had been operated by other colonial powers – notably the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain – before the British Empire incorporated them. These earlier colonial centres will have attracted migration in much the same way as Singapore later would. Many of these migrants and their descendants later moved on to Singapore seeking new opportunities. In any event, the foundation of Singapore as a major settlement and its development into an urban centre proved a far-sighted decision.
Current Singaporean officialdom stratifies the local population ethnically into Malays, Chinese, Indians, and others. Chapter 1 introduced the 2019 figures regarding their proportions relative to the entire population, namely 15.0, 76.0, 7.5, and 1.5 per cent, respectively (Singapore Department of Statistics 2021). It is obvious that the Chinese represent the biggest group numerically although they are historically immigrants to the area. These proportions used to be quite different in the early years of the colony. Table 6.2 reports the population figures from a selection of time points starting in 1824 (Lim Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 22). Not surprisingly, Malay people then constituted the most sizeable group, but the figures reveal a rapid increase of the Chinese population so that by 1901 the current proportions had almost been reached. One can also see a strong population growth apparently primarily propelled by Chinese immigration. The proportional size of the Indian population has remained relatively constant and so has the group of others (primarily Europeans and Eurasians).
Table 6.2. Population development in Singapore (adapted from Lim Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 22; see also Li Reference Li2021 for further details).
| Year | Population | Chinese % | Malay % | Indian % | Others % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1824 | 10,683 | 31.0 | 60.2 | 7.1 | 1.7 |
| 1849 | 52,891 | 52.9 | 32.2 | 11.9 | 3.0 |
| 1901 | 226,842 | 72.1 | 15.8 | 7.8 | 4.3 |
| 1931 | 557,745 | 75.1 | 11.7 | 9.1 | 4.2 |
| 1980 | 2,413,945 | 76.9 | 14.6 | 6.4 | 2.1 |
What is also interesting is that even the earliest figures are already based on the ethnic divisions still employed today. This is by no means obvious as all groups were – and still are – strongly stratified internally. The group of Indians especially was very heterogeneous in terms of origin, language, and religion (Lim Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 25–26). Accordingly, the modern Singapore nomenclature finds its roots in the very early history of the then colony. Lim (Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 22), following Bloom (Reference Bloom and Kapur1986: 352), argues that this system of ethnic compartmentalization is in fact much older and had already been used in Malacca. It went hand in hand with territorial allocations so that the ethnic groups came to reside in distinct areas of Singapore. The contemporary, largely touristic destinations of China Town, Kampong Glam (Kampung Gelam), and Little India can be traced back to these earlier territorial confinements. Modern Singapore pursues a policy of ethnic integration by which certain quotas in the distribution of the ethnic groups across neighbourhoods need to be observed (Sin Reference Sin2002).
The language ecology created by the early streams of migration must have been quite diverse and also multilingual – in spite of the ethnic compartmentalization. The broad ethnic labels in Table 6.2 represent cover terms for extensive ethnic and linguistic diversity. Lim (Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 23) states that the bulk of Chinese immigrants originates in the southern coastal provinces of China, in particular “Xiamen in southern Fujian (the Hokkiens), Chaozhou in the east of Guangdong (the Teochews), and Guangdong itself (the Cantonese).” In addition, there was a “sizeable representation of Hakkas and Hainanese” as well as “small numbers from the coastal counties of northern Fujian and ‘Three Rivers People’ from northern and central China” (Lim Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 23). Indians primarily came from Southern India representing “Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam language communities,” but also from Northern India speaking Punjabi and Bengali (Lim Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 25–26). The Malays were perhaps the most homogenous internally, although this group “included immigrants from various parts of the Malay archipelago” speaking Austronesian languages including Javanese, Buginese, and Boyanese (Lim Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 23).
One cannot but start wondering how communication proceeded in this colonial Babel. Since the British ruled Singapore and likely did not learn the various local languages, English must have been imposed from above on this newly created community from early on.Footnote 11 This can only have worked through intermediaries versatile in English and the other languages. Lim (Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 24–25) informs us that it was especially the Straits-born Chinese or Peranakans who served as such intermediaries (see also Bao Reference Bao, Siemund and Leimgruber2021). An early education system installed by British rule provided tuition in English and used English as a medium of instruction (see below). At the same time, there were local pidginized forms of Malay available that had already established themselves as interethnic communication systems (lingua francas) across the Malay peninsula and the surrounding archipelago. Amongst the most prominent are Bazaar Malay and Baba Malay (Lim Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 26–27). As contact languages, they represent restructured forms of Malay with various lexical and grammatical influences from the immigrant languages, especially Hokkien. Baba Malay used to be widely spoken in the community of the Straits Chinese (Peranakans) who originate in families formed by local Malay women and assimilated Chinese settlers. Singaporean Babas (Peranakans) stem from Penang and Malacca from where they traversed southwards to Singapore (Lim Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 24–25). Interestingly enough, English only began to replace Bazaar Malay as the local lingua franca after Singapore reached independence in 1965, primarily due to the ensuing language policy decisions. By then, English had already established itself in its distinct localized form of Colloquial Singapore English (Singlish). Again, this is a contact language that can be analyzed as a restructured and relexified form of a Sinitic variety enriched by influences from Malay and Tamil (Ho & Platt Reference Ho and Platt1993; Platt Reference Platt1975). We will look at Colloquial Singapore English in more detail in Section 6.3.3.
Modern Singapore has established an “ethnic-specific, English-centric bilingualism” (Bao Reference Bao, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 19). Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil are officially assigned to the three most important ethnic groups as mother tongues with English supposed to be known by everyone. This bilingual language policy was vigorously promoted by the Singaporean government after independence, but its roots can be reconstructed in early decisions by the colonial government. Bao (Reference Bao, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 21–22) writes that it was Raffles himself who envisioned an education system for the colony that aimed to educate the local elites in English and to provide education in the local languages to others. These local languages would be Malay, Chinese, and Tamil (besides perhaps other Indian languages). The sciences in particular were decreed to be taught in English, which still is a widely encountered educational philosophy in other postcolonial countries (see Chapter 5). Raffles’ ideas were institutionally enshrined in the Singapore Institution in 1823, known as Raffles Institution from 1868 on.Footnote 12 It has survived to this very day and is counted amongst the most prestigious schools in Singapore. Crucially, these early decisions foreshadow the contemporary functional division of languages that views English as connecting Singapore to the world, whereas the local ethnic languages provide cultural anchors. Moreover, it introduced important social stratification with English coming to be the preferred language in the upper social strata (Bao Reference Bao, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 22). Modern Singapore continues these divisions, albeit on a broader social basis.
The extension of the moniker ‘Chinese’ has changed substantially over time, especially after the Chinese Revolution in 1911. In the early decades, it referred to the Chinese immigrant languages taken to Singapore, notably Cantonese, Hokkien, and Teochew. One can assume that early Chinese education reflected these languages. The foundation of the Republic of China in 1912 triggered strong efforts to create a national language, leading to the promotion of Mandarin in the education system (see Chapter 5). The repercussions of these processes on the mainland of China could be perceived even in faraway Singapore, with efforts starting to promote the use of Mandarin in Chinese-based education (Bao Reference Bao, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 23). After independence in 1965, education in Chinese and the other local languages slowly gave way to English as the preferred medium of instruction until in 1987 English came to be selected as the only option. Again, this conversion was foreshadowed much earlier, as parts of the Chinese community – especially the Straits-born Peranakans – showed a strong preference for English, while other parts leaned towards the use of Chinese (Bao Reference Bao, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 23; Lim Reference Lim, Lim, Pakir and Wee2010: 24–25).Footnote 13
Despite the relatively detailed information available on the different ethnic groups and languages historically interacting in the area, the situation at the individual levels remains speculation. In keeping with the spirit of the preceding chapters, one would like to know more about the individual language dominance and acquisition patterns as well as the resulting types of bilingualism and multilingualism. Moreover, it would be revealing to learn about the individual migration trajectories and interactional patterns in the different languages. Li, Lorenz and Siemund (Reference Li, Lorenz and Siemund2022) as well as Li (Reference Li2021) probe into the Oral History Interviews held by the National Archives of Singapore (OHI-NAS 2020) and discover fascinating personal narratives bearing testimony to the above points. For example, they report the case of Elsie Quah (OHI-000213-EQ) born in 1899 into a Hokkien-speaking family of immigrants from China. They spoke Hokkien at home, but Elsie also learnt Malay in a mission school. She received training as a midwife in Kuala Lumpur before returning to Singapore where she worked the rest of her life. The interview proceeds in Colloquial Singapore English, but Elsie was most certainly also fluent in Bazaar Malay. Language repertoires like that of Elsie Quah are still partially mirrored in the current population of Singapore. The next section looks at these from a contemporary perspective.
6.3.2 Societal Multilingualism
Despite the official bilingual policy pursued by the Singaporean government that assigns a so-called mother tongue to each of three main ethnic groups in conjunction with English, the observable individual language repertoires still are considerably more heterogeneous and diverse. Nevertheless, the declaration of Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil as the respective ethnic mother tongues after independence effected a dwindling of the linguistic diversity present during colonial times. In particular, the Chinese community went through a process of language shift from the Sinitic immigrant vernaculars to Mandarin, but similar shifting processes can also be observed in the other ethnic groups (Cavallaro & Ng 2021: 134). In 2015, English, Mandarin, and Malay were the most widely used home languages with English in top position (see Chapter 1). For many speakers in Singapore, the mother tongues are in fact second languages, primarily acquired in the education system (Cavallaro & Ng 2021: 134–135). There can be no doubt that the Speak Mandarin Campaign initiated in 1979 and the conversion of the entire education system to English as the medium of instruction in 1987 are in a fundamental way responsible for these changes (Bao Reference Bao, Siemund and Leimgruber2021; Cavallaro & Ng 2021; Leimgruber, Siemund & Terassa Reference Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa2018; Siemund, Schulz & Schweinberger Reference Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger2014). Cavallaro and Ng (2021: 135) point out that “[f]or a great majority of Singaporeans, English is their most competent language, regardless of the language(s) they speak at home.”
The idea of an “ethnic-specific, English-centric bilingualism” (Bao Reference Bao, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 19), as introduced above, represents the reigning ideology in Singapore. However, underneath this ideological layer substantial linguistic diversity can still be observed, partially stratified by social parameters. In addition, when people report that they speak English, this can mean Standard Singapore English, Colloquial Singapore English, or both. For example, Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa (Reference Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa2018) as well as Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger (Reference Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger2014) studied the language repertoires, self-reported proficiencies, attitudes, and usage patterns in three cohorts of 450 students altogether. They represent university students, polytechnic students, as well as students from the Institute of Technical Education (ITE). The latter is a type of vocational school and was included in order for the three institutions to serve as proxies for differences in social background. Each institution contributed 150 students. Figure 6.2 shows that most students in the sample are bilingual and trilingual. A sizeable number of students reported four languages. Monolingualism is the exception with only eight cases in the sample. In other words, many students know other languages apart from English and their mother tongue.
Figure 6.2 Number of languages spoken by students.
The languages reported by the students are documented in Figure 6.3. One can see here that English is spoken by everyone and that a sizeable majority knows Mandarin. Interestingly, the Chinese vernaculars Hokkien, Cantonese, and Teochew also feature in the students’ language repertoires. Hokkien even ranges before Malay, while Tamil accrues the lowest number of speakers in the sample.Footnote 14 The presently attested languages still mirror the historical immigration patterns discussed in Section 6.3.1.
Figure 6.3 Languages spoken by students.
The language repertoires owned by the students can be gleaned from Figure 6.4. Not surprisingly, English in combination with Mandarin is the most widely reported profile, but it is somewhat unexpected that trilingualism of English, Hokkien, and Mandarin is attested more frequently than bilingualism of English and Malay or English and Tamil. In addition, we can see that Hokkien is typically part of the repertoires and that Malay occurs together with Chinese languages. Again, English here is a cover term for both Standard Singapore English and Colloquial Singapore English.Footnote 15
Figure 6.4 Language combinations amongst students that occur at least five times.
Note: Can = Cantonese, Eng = English, Hok = Hokkien, Mal = Malay, Man = Mandarin, Tam = Tamil, Teo = Teochew.
Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa (Reference Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa2018: 293) furthermore show that bilingualism of English and Mandarin is highest amongst university students and lowest with students from the Institute of Technical Education. This is to be expected, as university students – representing the highest social groups – will conform closest to governmental policies. Polytechnic students fall in between. Also, the Institute of Technical Education accrues by far the highest number of English–Malay bilinguals, pointing to important ethnic and social stratification. The same holds for bilingualism of English and Tamil. Trilingualism of English, Hokkien, and Mandarin is most prominent amongst polytechnic students.
Students from the three school types differ systematically in the number of languages they report. This is illustrated in Figure 6.5. When comparing university with polytechnic students, one can see that bilingualism is higher in the first group. Trilingualism is more widespread in the second group. Again, the linguistic behaviour of university students corresponds more closely to official policies. These differences are mainly driven by Chinese students. There are also many bilingual students at the Institute of Technical Education, but this bilingualism is largely ethnic-specific and induced by the high number of Malay students in this educational track.
Figure 6.5 Number of languages spoken by university (Uni), polytechnic (Poly), and ITE students (ITE).
The questionnaire used in the studies by Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger (Reference Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger2014) and Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa (Reference Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa2018) also asked students to rank the languages in their repertoires according to proficiency. The ranking is based on self-assessments and serves as a proxy for the corresponding objective proficiencies. With the exception of two students, the ranking involved at most four languages per students. Table 6.3 details the mean rankings for seven languages according to school type.
Evidently, English is the language all students feel most proficient in, there being a slight downslope from university to ITE students. English is followed by the three official mother tongues in terms of proficiency. Noticeably, Malay is reported as the weakest mother tongue with regard to the total means. The Chinese vernaculars of Cantonese, Hokkien, and Teochew received the lowest proficiencies. This ranking nicely reflects the social prestige associated with these languages (recall the hierarchy of languages introduced in Chapter 1). It furthermore underlines the difficulty of achieving balanced bilingualism even in a society that officially promotes bilingualism. With some caution one may interpret the ranking as the incipient development towards monolingualism in English. This may be an overinterpretation. However, since monolingualism is never pure but a matter of degree, it is already built into the imbalanced system.Footnote 16
Table 6.3. Mean rankings of languages across schools. The highest rank is “1.” Languages are ordered alphabetically.
| School | Can | Eng | Hok | Mal | Man | Tam | Teo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Uni | 2.74 | 1.13 | 3.14 | 3.00 | 1.96 | 2.00 | 3.43 |
| Poly | 3.03 | 1.17 | 2.90 | 2.42 | 2.02 | 2.00 | 3.45 |
| ITE | 3.44 | 1.37 | 3.05 | 1.73 | 1.90 | 2.00 | 3.29 |
| Total | 3.00 | 1.22 | 3.02 | 2.03 | 1.97 | 2.00 | 3.41 |
Note: Can = Cantonese, Eng = English, Hok = Hokkien, Mal = Malay, Man = Mandarin, Tam = Tamil, Teo = Teochew.
Table 6.4 catalogues the absolute number of students in the relevant language rankings. English rank one accumulated the highest number of students. For Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil, this is rank two. Chinese vernaculars are strong in ranks three and four, especially Hokkien. Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa (Reference Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa2018: 295) further calculated the self-assessed proficiencies averaged across listening and reading comprehension as well as spoken and written production. On a five-point Likert scale, students reported an average of 1.68 for their rank one language (mostly English) and 2.28 for their rank two language (mostly one of the mother tongues). The languages at rank three were assessed at 3.0, again on average. One can see a clear monotonic decrease, but also that students do not consider themselves as fully proficient even in their rank one language. Not surprisingly, there are differences across schools and the domains considered (spoken vs. written). The assessment of the rank one language as imperfect may be due to students’ supposedly high levels of metalinguistic awareness, but could also be viewed as a consequence of the strong competition exerted by the Singaporean education system.
Table 6.4. Absolute language rankings. The highest rank is “1.” Languages are ordered alphabetically.
| Rank | Can | Eng | Hok | Mal | Man | Tam | Teo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5 | 355 | 3 | 27 | 51 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 4 | 85 | 12 | 70 | 250 | 14 | 3 |
| 3 | 36 | 5 | 110 | 11 | 33 | 1 | 11 |
| 4 | 14 | 1 | 21 | 10 | 2 | 0 | 16 |
| 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| n/a | 391 | 4 | 304 | 332 | 113 | 434 | 418 |
| Total | 450 | 450 | 450 | 450 | 450 | 450 | 450 |
Note: Can = Cantonese, Eng = English, Hok = Hokkien, Mal = Malay, Man = Mandarin, Tam = Tamil, Teo = Teochew.
The proficiency rankings provided by the students are further supported by language use data that reveal important differences across speaker groups. Consider Figure 6.6: students’ preferred language for communication with their siblings is English, while we find usage of English and Mandarin with their parents. They hardly use English to talk to their grandparents. Between parents, English is used alongside the other languages, including Chinese vernaculars. English hardly matters in the communication between grandparents. Malay is used more consistently across all types of interlocutors.Footnote 17 Notably, students’ use of English is highest in communication with their best friends. Such data underline the ongoing language shift to English.
Figure 6.6 Differences in language use.
The studies by Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger (Reference Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger2014) as well as Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa (Reference Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa2018) also tried to uncover the attitudes that students from different social backgrounds associate with English and the mother tongues. To that end, they confronted students with the following seven statements asking them to rate these statements on a seven-point Likert scale.
1. Proficiency in English is more important than mother tongue proficiency.
2. The mother tongues should only be maintained if it is not done at the expense of English.
3. It is normal for Singapore speakers to speak only in English.
4. You are still a Singaporean even if you don’t speak your mother tongue very often.
5. You are still a Singaporean even if you can’t speak your mother tongue.
6. I don’t think speaking my mother tongue is a critical part of my self-definition.
7. I think speaking Singlish is a critical part of my self-definition.
The responses to these statements can be gleaned from Figure 6.7. Regarding statement number one, all students assign more weight to English than the mother tongues, corroborating various observations made above. However, the responses to statements two and three suggest that university students more strongly embrace the mother tongues in comparison to the two other cohorts. This can be interpreted as greater compliance with official policies, but it perhaps also suggests that the social elite values the mother tongues as cultural anchors. The responses to statements four and five can be taken to mean that a Singaporean identity is not strictly tied to mother tongue knowledge, and all groups are in agreement here. One may conclude that English represents the more important carrier of national identity. However, university students in particular consider the mother tongues important for their personal identity conceptions. They rather strongly disagree with statement six. Finally, it is interesting to note that all student groups view Colloquial Singapore English (Singlish) as a critical part of their self-definition. This underlines the importance of Singlish as a national identity marker that is also embraced by the socially most prestigious group of university students – in fact, more so than by polytechnic students. This is surprising, as in 2000 the Singaporean government launched a dedicated campaign – the Speak Good English Movement – to encourage its citizens to speak standard English rather than Colloquial Singapore English (Siemund, Schulz & Schweinberger Reference Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger2014: 341). Evidently, this campaign has not been able to destroy the covert prestige of Singlish.
Figure 6.7 Attitudes towards English, Singlish, and mother tongue.
The historical and current situations of Singapore underline observations made earlier in the present book that multilingualism represents a complex and highly dynamic mix at both the individual and societal level. There are overarching trends, but also massive individual differences. Overall, official language policy has produced a greater degree of homogeneity since independence, elevating English to the most dominant language at the expense of the mother tongues, the original vernaculars, and also the traditional lingua francas. Levels of multilingualism have been lowered, rather than increased. Ironically, the language most strongly stratified internally now seems to be English.
6.3.3 Singapore English
In the context of Singapore, the label ‘English’ serves as a cover term for a spectrum of codes ranging from a basilectal form of Colloquial Singapore English to a standard variety – Standard Singapore English – that is not fundamentally different from Standard British or American English, especially in its written form. Singapore English has been extensively studied and there is no need to duplicate these research findings here (Ho & Platt Reference Ho and Platt1993; Leimgruber Reference Leimgruber2013; Platt Reference Platt1975; Platt & Weber Reference Platt and Weber1980). However, there are two topical issues that deserve attention, namely (i) the historical reconstruction of Colloquial Singapore English and (ii) its internal stratification by social factors. These will be explored in what follows, based on two salient grammatical phenomena of Colloquial Singapore English: already as a marker of completive aspect and pragmatic particles.
The use of the adverb already to signal the completion of a situation counts amongst the most salient markers of Colloquial Singapore English. Its occurrence can be readily motivated by substrate influence from Chinese where the particle le 了serves as the functional equivalent. Illustration of this use of already is provided in example (1). Besides completion, CSE already also possesses inchoative or inceptive uses (It rain already. ‘It has started to rain.’ Bao Reference Bao2005: 241; Li Reference Li2021) that, however, are not relevant here.
| (1) | Colloquial Singapore English (Bao Reference Bao2005: 239) | ||
| a. | I see the movie already. | ||
| ‘I saw the movie.’ | |||
| b. | I wash my hand already. | ||
| ‘I have washed/washed my hand.’ | |||
Example (2) provides illustration of the coding in Chinese, making the correspondence visible.Footnote 18
| (2) | Chinese (Lijun Li) | |||
| 我 | 吃 | 过 | 了。 | |
| Wǒ | chī | guò | le. | |
| 1SG | eat | PAST | ASP | |
| ‘I have eaten.’ CSE: I eat already. | ||||
Siemund and Li (Reference Siemund, Li, Ziegeler and Zhiming2017) compared the raw frequencies of the adverb already in corpora of British and Singapore English (International Corpus of English: British Component, ICE-GB; Singapore Component, ICE-SG).Footnote 19 They detected more than twice as many occurrences of already in the spoken component of the Singapore Corpus, in comparison to the one sampling British English (see Table 6.5). The two corpora are nearly identical in size. The most likely cause underlying this difference is the use of already as an aspectual marker in CSE.
Table 6.5. Frequencies of already in ICE-GB and ICE-SG (Siemund & Li 2017: 22).
| Words | already | already (ptw) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ICE-GB | 630,903 | 208 | 0.33 |
| ICE-SG | 601,980 | 491 | 0.82 |
Note: ptw = per thousand words.
In a more recent study, Li and Siemund (Reference Leimgruber, Siemund, Siemund and Leimgruber2021) probe into historical data of CSE using the Oral History Interviews stored at the National Archives of Singapore (OHI-NAS 2020). The oldest speaker in their sample was born in 1899 and recorded in 1979. They make two observations. First, the use of aspectual already is more prominent with speakers who have a Chinese background. This is perhaps not surprising but underlines that CSE is internally differentiated and not homogenous. Figure 6.8 illustrates these differences. The group named “other” includes speakers with a Malay, Indian, or Peranakan background. Notably, the Chinese group is not at all homogenous internally, perhaps due to various social background variables.
Figure 6.8 Frequency of already per page amongst speakers of different ethnic backgrounds.
Second, Li and Siemund (Reference Lorenz, Toprak and Siemund2021) show that aspectual already occurs with all speakers of Chinese background independent of their year of birth (see Figure 6.9, based on a sample of eight speakers; see Li Reference Li2021 for a more extensive data set). Although there are important differences across the individual speakers, there does not seem to be an increase or decrease over time. Speakers of CSE seem to use aspectual already today much in the same way as they did 100 years ago. These findings point to substantial diachronic stability of CSE.Footnote 20
Figure 6.9 Frequencies of already per page of individual speakers born between 1899 and 1948.
Similar results emanate from an analysis of CSE pragmatic particles in the Oral History Interviews (Li, Lorenz & Siemund Reference Li, Lorenz and Siemund2022). As is well known, CSE is rich in pragmatic particles that find their origin in the Sinitic substrates, Malay, Bazaar Malay, and perhaps also Tamil (Lim Reference Lim2007). The analysis of Li, Lorenz and Siemund (Reference Li, Lorenz and Siemund2022) involves 1,910 occurrences of the particles ah, lah, leh, lor, and meh from 101 speakers born between 1899 and 1983 with interviews conducted between 1979 and 2009. The particles are used to modulate the illocutionary force of utterances in various ways, as illustrated in the examples below.Footnote 21
| (3) | a. | That was just after the 1968 ah? [OHI-003206-MA] |
| b. | I got a certificate for 25 years of service ah. [OHI-E000284-CNS] | |
| (4) | a. | Only two big food stalls lah I remember. [OHI-002951-JY] |
| b. | So, I apply for Health Visitor lah. [OHI-000213-EQ] | |
| (5) | a. | Probably after he left leh? [OHI-E000462-LWK] |
| b. | […], we have almost a hundred people leh. [OHI-000416-TCH] | |
| (6) | I forgot lor. [OHI-001631-OCN] | |
| (7) | They are the shopkeepers who extended their goods on the five-foot-way and on the road meh. [OHI-002107-CPK] | |
The scatterplots in Figure 6.10 depict the normalized frequencies of the particles ah and lah, which represent the most commonly used particles, against the age of the speakers. The trend lines suggest a slight increase with speaker age, but since the group of 50–70 year olds is over-represented in the sample (n=60), these trends need to be viewed with caution. Be that as it may, the findings indicate that the pragmatic particles were widely used in the early twentieth century. The most likely source languages are Hokkien and/or Bazaar Malay (Lim Reference Lim2007). We may further note that some speakers in the sample did not produce any particles.
Figure 6.10 Normalized (per 10,000 words) frequency of occurrence of the particles ah (left) and lah (right) according to speaker age.
Regarding social predictors like gender and level of education, Li, Lorenz and Siemund (Reference Li, Lorenz and Siemund2022) demonstrate that the particle ah is associated with male and lah with female gender. In addition, ah is over-represented amongst speakers of high (university) education, while lah is preferred in the speaker group with medium (secondary) levels of education. Speakers with an Indian or Malay background favour ah and disfavour lah. Using random forests to predict the occurrence of ah versus lah, Li, Lorenz and Siemund (Reference Li, Lorenz and Siemund2022) can show that speaker identity is the strongest predictor, followed by interview year, level of education, gender, ethnicity, age, and year of birth. As in the case of already, the data point to a fundamental stability of Colloquial Singapore English as well as an early differentiation along social background variables (see also Buschfeld Reference Buschfeld, Siemund and Leimgruber2021; Leimgruber et al. Reference Leimgruber, Lim, Gonzales and Hieramoto2020).
6.3.4 Summary
The preceding survey of Singaporean multilingualism has essentially produced three results. First, a substantial portion of the currently observable multilingual texture can be traced back to the founding years of the then British colony. It is quite remarkable how persistent the early decisions are, in spite of the many dedicated governmental policy initiatives and activities – not only related to language. Second, post-independent policy initiatives did produce effects, especially regarding the streamlining of the formerly extensive multilingualism into the official bilingual model of English in combination with a mother tongue. The main losers are the vernaculars and early lingua francas, much as in other parts of the world. English is developing into the dominant and most widely used language. And third, Colloquial Singapore English has been maintained despite its officially bad reputation. Moreover, it appears socially stratified internally to a greater extent and with a longer history than previously assumed. Evidently, there is scope for much more work here.
6.4 Hong Kong and Hong Kong English
A former British colony like Singapore, Hong Kong never developed into an independent state. Instead, it remained a British colony until it was reinstated as part of the People’s Republic of China in 1997, after the 99-year British lease of the territory ceased. Following the handover, Hong Kong was declared a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China for another fifty years. As we will see in the following sections, these differences in relation to Singapore entail important consequences for the development of its multilingual ecology and for the position of English in it.
6.4.1 Historical Multilingualism
When Hong Kong Island became a British colony in 1842, it quickly developed into an extensively multilingual place. Bolton and Lee (Reference Bolton, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 38) inform us that the island was sparsely populated before the arrival of the British, there being a few fishing villages and boat dwelling communities. Much as in Singapore, the newly established colony soon became a magnet for immigration, but in the case of Hong Kong this primarily involved people from nearby Southern China, especially the Guangdong and Fujian provinces (Bolton & Lee Reference Bolton, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 40). These immigrants transplanted mainly three languages to Hong Kong, namely Cantonese (also known as ‘Punti’), Hakka (Hok-ha), and Hokkien (Hoklo). The Hakka represent former immigrants from Northern China who migrated South due to social unrest, upheaval, and invasion preceding the fourth century C.E. (Constable Reference Constable and Constable1996: 9). This early immigration established an ethnic and language ecology that in one way or another has been continued to the present day. The first Hong Kong census from 1911 reports almost half a million inhabitants – a sharp increase from the approximately 5,000 precolonial inhabitants (Bolton & Lee Reference Bolton, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 38, 42). Table 6.6 shows that the Punti or Cantonese represented the major part of the population.
Table 6.6. The 1911 Hong Kong census results on languages (Bolton & Lee Reference Bolton, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 42).Footnote 22
| District | Hong Kong Island and Kowloon | New Territories, Northern District | New Territories, Southern District | Total | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Punti | 311,992 | 31,595 | 16,395 | 359,982 | 81.0 |
| Hakka | 22,822 | 37,053 | 7,321 | 67,196 | 15.1 |
| Hoklo | 6,949 | 75 | 1,369 | 8,393 | 1.9 |
| Others | 2,864 | 124 | – | 2,988 | 0.7 |
| Not stated | 5,791 | 275 | 39 | 6,105 | 1.3 |
| Total | 350,418 | 59,122 | 25,124 | 444,664 | 100.0 |
Until 1997, Hong Kong remained largely unaffected by the linguistic developments in Mainland China, which saw a strong promotion of the national language Putonghua and, with the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949, the development of a simplified character script (Bolton, Bacon-Shone & Lee Reference Bolton, Bacon-Shone, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 161; see also Chapter 5). The British colony practically served as a shelter where the use of Cantonese and the traditional script could be continued.Footnote 23 Not surprisingly, the influence of Putonghua increased after 1997.
Much as with Singapore English, the origin of Hong Kong English can be traced back to the early colonial years and, again as in Singapore, the education system played an important role in its promotion. Bolton and Lee (Reference Bolton, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 47) relate early Hong Kong English to “Canton jargon” or Chinese Pidgin English, widely used in Southern China (especially Guangzhou and Macau) before Hong Kong became a colony and itself heavily influenced by Cantonese (see also Schneider Reference Schneider2007: 133). Like the Raffles Institution in Singapore, the Government Central School of Hong Kong, opened in 1862 and renamed as Queen’s College in 1894, introduced formal education in Chinese and English and laid the foundation for all subsequent English-medium and Chinese-medium education in the area. It still counts as one of Hong Kong’s most prestigious schools. For a long time until the handover to China in 1997, the language ecology of Hong Kong was characterized by a small proportion of monolingual English speakers, a bilingual Chinese–English speaking local elite, and a great majority of Chinese speakers (mostly Cantonese) with strongly varying command of English (Schneider Reference Schneider2007: 135–137). Chinese–English bilingualism became more widely distributed through the population during the last decades of British colonial rule.
What I find remarkable is that in neither the context of Singapore nor Hong Kong does one find a narrative of negative effects associated with bilingual education or multilingualism in general. The establishment of Chinese-medium education, besides English-medium education, does not suggest a general devaluation of Chinese. In contrast, the conflictual relationships of the British Empire with the Celtic populations in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, as well as the indigenous populations in North America and Australia rather produced a devaluation of the relevant languages, if they were recognized as languages at all. One may recall from Chapter 1 that the study of Welsh–English bilingualism produced some of the earliest publications arguing for negative cognitive effects associated with bilingualism. Multilingualism in Singapore only came to be questioned after independence when it began to be streamlined into today’s ethnic-based bilingual model. Nevertheless, this did not produce a discourse on monolingual advantages or bilingual disadvantages (and mainly affected the vernaculars).
6.4.2 Societal Multilingualism
During most of its colonial history, Hong Kong’s only official language was English. Chinese was attributed co-official status in 1974 (Bolton, Bacon-Shone & Lee Reference Bolton, Bacon-Shone, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 173; Wang & Kirkpatrick Reference Wang, Kirkpatrick, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 229). In practical terms, this mostly meant Cantonese. When Hong Kong was repatriated to China in 1997, the status of Putonghua suddenly increased elevating it to another official language in the area. This new situation was formally sanctioned in the Biliterate and Trilingual (兩文三語政策) language policy (BT policy) that recognizes Cantonese, English, and Putonghua as official languages and promotes literacy in both the Chinese and Latin scripts (Wang & Kirkpatrick Reference Wang, Kirkpatrick, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 231). One consequence of this arrangement appears to be a decline in English proficiencies, due to compulsory Chinese-medium instruction (Poon Reference Poon, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 104–105). Arguably, Hong Kong is currently witnessing a recalibration of the status of English from a second to a foreign language, subject to ongoing change (see below). There is a concomitant increase in the ability to speak Putonghua, namely from 25.3 per cent in 1996 to 48.6 per cent in 2016, promoted by radio broadcasting in Putonghua, public announcements, and community activities (Poon Reference Poon, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 107). One is reminded of the Speak Mandarin Campaign in Singapore.
Contemporary societal ethnic and linguistic diversity, however, goes considerably beyond Chinese and English. Bolton, Bacon-Shone and Lee (Reference Bolton, Bacon-Shone, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 173) provide the summary shown in Table 6.7, inter alia illustrating the high numbers of Filipinos and Indonesians in the area. According to Poon (Reference Poon, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 108), most of them work as domestic helpers.
Table 6.7. Numbers and percentages of Hong Kong residents claiming selected ethnicities (Bolton, Bacon-Shone & Lee Reference Bolton, Bacon-Shone, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 173).
| Ethnicity | Number | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Chinese | 6,752,202 | 92.0 |
| Filipino | 184,081 | 2.5 |
| Indonesian | 153,299 | 2.1 |
| White | 58,209 | 0.8 |
| Indian | 36,462 | 0.5 |
| Nepalese | 25,472 | 0.3 |
| Pakistani | 18,094 | 0.2 |
| Thai | 10,215 | 0.1 |
| Japanese | 9,976 | 0.1 |
| Other Asian | 19,589 | 0.3 |
| Others | 584,383 | 8.0 |
| Total | 7,336,585 | 100.0 |
Table 6.8 translates these ethnic figures into language use, detailing increases and decreases from 2011 to 2016. The situation is relatively stable, with slight increases regarding English and Putonghua. Use of English appears to be growing, despite the above complaints about its falling standards.
Table 6.8. Percentage of the population five years old and above able to speak selected languages (Bolton, Bacon-Shone & Lee Reference Bolton, Bacon-Shone, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 162).
The graphs in Figure 6.11 portray language use in terms of the “usual spoken language” excluding Cantonese as the most widely used language. They attest a slight increase in English from 1991 to 2016, though only a very small increase in the use of Putonghua. Much as in Singapore and throughout China, the use of Chinese vernaculars is falling.
Figure 6.11 Usual spoken language, in per cent (population aged five or older), without Cantonese (Census and Statistics Department: Items A107, censuses and by-censuses 1991–2016.
A different picture emerges from the development of the knowledge of second languages in the same time frame, as detailed in Figure 6.12. The data come from speakers for whom Cantonese is their first language. By 2016, knowledge of Putonghua had almost reached parity with English. As stipulated by the Biliterate and Trilingual language policy, Hong Kong Cantonese speakers have developed trilingualism of Cantonese, English, and Putonghua. To be sure, these figures reveal little about their objective (rather than their perceived) oral and written proficiencies.
Figure 6.12 Knowledge of second languages, in per cent (population aged five or older), by L1 Cantonese-speakers born in Hong Kong (Census and Statistics Department, 2018: Items A123, censuses and by-censuses 1991–2016).
Languages and ethnic groups are not evenly distributed across the territory of Hong Kong, as Bolton, Bacon-Shone and Lee (Reference Bolton, Bacon-Shone, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021) demonstrate. Not surprisingly, English along with other Western languages is strongly concentrated on Hong Kong Island, that is, the original British dominion. The main Sinitic varieties of Cantonese, Chiu Chau (Teochew), Fukien, and Hakka predominate in the New Territories south of the Chinese border. Indian languages are strongly represented on Kowloon Peninsula. Figure 6.13 offers a succinct overview, with more detailed information provided in Bolton, Bacon-Shone and Lee (Reference Bolton, Bacon-Shone, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021).
Figure 6.13 Chinese languages and other languages spoken in Hong Kong (Bolton, Bacon-Shone & Lee Reference Bolton, Bacon-Shone, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 172).
6.4.3 Hong Kong English
Few scholars would perhaps doubt the existence of a distinct variety of Hong Kong English, but in comparison to Colloquial Singapore English it appears much harder to describe by reference to specific grammatical properties. According to Schneider (Reference Schneider2007: 133), Hong Kong (and Hong Kong English) “can be regarded as having reached phase 3, with some traces of phase 2 still observable,” but this assessment was made several years ago. Phases two and three in Schneider’s (Reference Schneider2003, Reference Schneider2007) Dynamic Model refer to “exonormative stabilization” and “nativization.” The assessment rests on the distinct accent of Hong Kong English, many lexical borrowings from Cantonese, as well as some incipient morphosyntactic features identifying this variety (Schneider Reference Schneider2007: 138), especially regarding relative clause formation and finiteness (Gisborne Reference Gisborne2000, Reference Gisborne2009). Further grammatical variables are addressed in Fuchs (Reference Fuchs, Siemund and Leimgruber2021), but the majority of these attest frequency differentials in comparison to other varieties.
Hong Kong English, as other postcolonial varieties of English, received and keeps receiving its special characteristics from the various contact languages present in the local language ecology. There can be no doubt that Cantonese has been most influential, but according to Fuchs (Reference Fuchs, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 287) several additional channels of influence need to be recognized, including South Asian varieties of English. These are summarized in Table 6.9.
Table 6.9. Historical and contemporary sources of influence on Hong Kong English along the ethnic/L1 dimension (Fuchs Reference Fuchs, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 287).
Apparently, the high number of domestic helpers from the Philippines can be assumed to exert a disproportionately strong influence on Hong Kong English, as speaking English – that is, Philippine English – is a prerequisite for their employment and they are in close and prolonged contact with small children (see also Bolton & Lee Reference Bolton, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 54; Bolton, Bacon-Shone & Lee Reference Bolton, Bacon-Shone, Lee, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 172; Poon Reference Poon, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 100). Similar patterns emerge in Dubai and the Gulf Region (see Section 6.5).Footnote 24
6.4.4 Summary
It is perhaps not completely unfounded speculation to suggest that Hong Kong will amalgamate with Mainland China in the long run. The People’s Republic of China is vested in installing Putonghua as the standard form of Chinese used across the nation (Klöter Reference Klöter, Klöter and Saarela2020). English comes in as the first foreign or second language. The main losers in this competition are the Sinitic vernaculars. Cantonese in Hong Kong may come under the same pressure of Putonghua as it already is in Guangdong Province (see Chapter 5). Hong Kong English (Konglish) would then come to align with Chinese English (Chinglish), however that is to be defined.
6.5 Dubai and Gulf English
The territory of what is today the United Arab Emirates (UAE) never was a British colony – only a protectorate. After the discovery of oil in the middle of the twentieth century, the UAE along with other so-called Gulf States experienced an unforeseen economic boom. An extensive expatriate labour force hailed from practically all parts of the world producing a strong imbalance between the local Arab population and the international residents. The foreign population amounts to as much as 90 per cent, as observed in Chapter 1. This created the need for a common language. Even though Arabic is the official language of the UAE, English has developed into the de facto lingua franca of the country and the entire Gulf area.Footnote 25 It is common for native Emiratis to speak English with the expatriate labour force. There are signs that English is developing a localized form of Gulf English or UAE English (Boyle Reference Boyle2012, Reference Boyle2014; Fussell Reference Fussell2011).
6.5.1 Historical Multilingualism
Before the oil-based economic developments started, the Gulf Coast along the Arabian Peninsula used to be sparsely populated territory. Society was organized in clans – their economy being based on agriculture, fishing, and pearling. The original forts, around which the villages were organized and which offered protection in times of crisis, can still be visited in the presently seven emirates of Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al Quwain. They bear testimony to the pre-modern social structure that appears not so far away from the Scottish Highland clans or the central German compartmentalized castle system. The East Coast at the Gulf of Oman is considerably more fertile due to water captured by and under the Hajar Mountain ridge. The local Arab population can be assumed to have spoken a variety of local dialects, there perhaps being individual multi-dialectism. The early nineteenth century beginnings are in fact not too different from what we observed for Singapore and Hong Kong above.
British interest in the region arose around the turn of the nineteenth century when the local Arab clans apparently began to engage too extensively in piracy and warfare, interfering with the British sea routes to India (Pacione Reference Pacione2005; Siemund, Al-Issa & Leimgruber Reference Siemund, Al-Issa and Leimgruber2021). This provoked British naval intervention in 1819, followed by a series of peace treaties between the various sheikdoms and continued British presence in the area. The peace treaties inspired the coinage of the so-called Trucial States (also Trucial Coast), signifying an assemblage of sheikdoms under British supervision and partial governance. The Trucial States lasted until 1971 when the seven emirates introduced above formed a federation known as the United Arab Emirates today.Footnote 26 Oman and Bahrain formed independent states. The Trucial States thus were a British protectorate and this signals an important difference relative to Singapore and Hong Kong. Little is known about the exact extent to which British rule penetrated into the local structures, but it seems clear that the roots of the present dominance of English – including English culture – in the area can be traced back to these early social interactions. The oldest English-speaking school in Dubai and the entire UAE is the Dubai English Speaking School (DESS), founded in 1963.Footnote 27 By comparison, the Singapore Institution was formed in 1823 and the Government Central School of Hong Kong in 1862. We can see a time lapse of around 100 years (see Sections 6.3.1 and 6.4.1).
After 1900, the Gulf Region experienced increasing population growth that began to gain momentum after the discovery of oil and the establishment of the United Arab Emirates. Some milestone figures can be taken from Table 6.10.
Table 6.10. Population development in Dubai (Pacione Reference Pacione2005: 257).
| Year | Population |
|---|---|
| 1833 | 1,500 |
| 1900 | 10,000 |
| 1968 | 59,000 |
| 1985 | 370,788 |
| 1995 | 689,420 |
| 2000 | 862,387 |
By 2010, the figures had already risen to 1,905,476 to reach a staggering 3,411,200 people in 2020 (Dubai Statistics Center 2020). To recall, more than 90 per cent of these represent foreigners, mirroring the broader immigration patterns in Singapore and Hong Kong surprisingly closely.Footnote 28 The share of indigenous Malays in Singapore has been hovering at around 15 per cent for a long time. There are probably no descendants of precolonial indigenous Hong Kongers, as the present majority group of Cantonese are in fact immigrants themselves. Regarding the United Arab Emirates, an important difference is that the ownership of the territory has always remained in the hands of the indigenous Arab people and that immigrants have the legal status of foreigners (expatriates).Footnote 29
6.5.2 Societal Multilingualism
The varieties of English in Singapore and Hong Kong developed during times when sea and land traffic was still relatively slow and dangerous, and the number of people shippable within a temporal reference unit was rather limited. Today’s air traffic is fast, cheap, and extremely reliable. Cheap labour (construction workers, taxi drivers, domestic helpers, nannies, shop assistants, cleaners, etc.) travels from poor to prosperous regions at an enormous pace and in very high numbers. The digital flow of money and the easy use of social media allow their families to remain in the source areas of migration, but still continue to be functional units. Personal remittances to the Philippines, to cite just one salient case, amounted to nearly 10 per cent of the national GDP in 2019.Footnote 30 As argued in Section 6.4.3, there is evidence that Hong Kong English is being influenced by the English spoken by the numerous Philippine nannies working there (Fuchs Reference Fuchs, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 286). Similar claims have also been made in the context of the UAE. According to Hopkyns (Reference Hopkyns, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 254), 94 per cent of the Dubai Emirati families employ domestic helpers who typically speak English with the Emirati children.
Foreign residents to the UAE to a large extent come from former colonial countries where English has been maintained as an official or co-official language. Reliable figures are practically impossible to find, but Siemund, Al-Issa and Leimgruber (Reference Siemund, Al-Issa and Leimgruber2021: 194) estimate that 51 per cent of the foreign population in Dubai comes from India, 17 per cent from Pakistan, 9 per cent from Bangladesh, 3 per cent from the Philippines, and 20 per cent from various other countries (see also Theodoropoulou Reference Theodoropoulou, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 66). They speak specific varieties of English, such as Indian English, Pakistani English, or Philippine English. This gives rise to an interesting new dialect laboratory in which language contact and change in the context of the encounter of different varieties of English can be studied in real time, as it were.Footnote 31 Piller (Reference Piller, Smakman and Heinrich2018: 78) describes Dubai as a “multilingual and multicultural utopia.”
The official language of the UAE is Arabic, but the language most widely used is English (Al-Issa Reference Al-Issa, Siemund and Leimgruber2021; Theodoropoulou 2021).Footnote 32 This establishes a situation of diglossia – in fact triglossia, as Arabic bifurcates into Modern Standard Arabic and Gulf Arabic (Khaleeji). There is widespread concern that the younger generation is beginning to lose Arabic (especially in the written language), as English dominates public discourse and bears extremely high prestige (Romaine Reference Romaine and Ricento2015; Theodoropoulou 2021: 68–69). Al-Issa (Reference Al-Issa, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 119) points out that “English becomes connected to all things modern, including business, education, and internationalism, while Arabic is relegated to a lower status as the language of religion, tradition, family, and home.” Speakers of different forms of Arabic frequently fall back on English in their communicative encounters, rather than using Modern Standard Arabic (Al-Issa & Dahan Reference Al-Issa, Dahan, Al-Issa and Dahan2011: 11).
Higher education in the UAE is almost universally based on English as the medium of instruction (Hopkyns Reference Hopkyns, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 254–255). The government public schools officially use Arabic and teach English as a foreign language, but in actual practice a substantial portion of the instruction proceeds in English (Al-Issa Reference Al-Issa, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 122). The foreign population sends their children to private schools most of which are based on curricula developed in the United Kingdom or the United States. Since English is allotted such a high status, Emirati parents have developed a preference for sending their children to private schools, too, on the assumption that the standards of English are higher there (Al-Issa Reference Al-Issa, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 122). In view of this situation, one can surmise that many, if not most Emirati children acquire English as a late first or early second language.
Siemund, Al-Issa and Leimgruber (Reference Siemund, Al-Issa and Leimgruber2021), building on earlier research carried out in Singapore (Leimgruber, Siemund & Terassa Reference Leimgruber, Siemund and Terassa2018; Siemund, Schulz & Schweinberger Reference Siemund, Schulz and Schweinberger2014), studied the languages repertoires of 692 students at the American University of Sharjah in spring 2019. They encountered extensive multilingualism and linguistic diversity. Sharjah – one of the seven emirates – borders on Dubai with many students commuting between the two emirates. Differentiating between UAE citizens and other nationalities, Figure 6.14 charts the number of students by the number of languages they speak. As in Singapore, there is extensive bilingualism and trilingualism with the former being most prominent (see Section 6.3.2). Figure 6.14 looks surprisingly similar to Figure 6.2.
Figure 6.14 Number of languages declared, by citizenship.
Figure 6.15 reveals the languages spoken by the students, again differentiating between UAE nationals and other nationalities. Not surprisingly, English was declared by the highest number of students in both groups – in fact all students – followed by Arabic, other languages, French, Urdu, and Hindi. English is a prerequisite for enrolling in the American University. Evidently, there are many students from other Arabic-speaking countries (such as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan). Urdu and Hindi are also strongly represented amongst non-UAE students.
Figure 6.15 Languages used ordered by frequency of attestation, by citizenship.
The most frequently reported language combinations are shown in Figure 6.16. Besides the expectable combination of Arabic and English, this language profile also features French, apparently acquired as a foreign language. English alone or in combination with Arabic further profiles with the Asian languages Hindi, Malayalam, and Urdu, bearing witness to the considerable number of students with South Asian roots. Amongst the most common other languages count Turkish, Tamil, German, Korean, Swahili, Russian, and Japanese. The language combinations in Figure 6.16 together make up 75.87 per cent of all reported combinations. The combination of Arabic plus English alone accounts for 43.64 per cent of all cases.Footnote 33
Figure 6.16 Most frequent language combinations, by citizenship.
Note: Ara = Arabic, Eng = English, Fre = French, Hin = Hindi, Mal = Malayalam, Oth = Other, Urd = Urdu.
As in the context of Singapore, students were further asked to rank their languages according to their self-assessed proficiencies. The outcome of this ranking can be gathered from Table 6.11. English was ranked highest by all students, closely followed by Arabic in the group of UAE citizens. It is noteworthy that even UAE students rank English highest, again mirroring the results found in Singapore. These findings lend some credence to the discourse on losing Arabic, as introduced above. Interestingly, the Asian languages are equally found in the lower ranks, with the exception of Malayalam (based on five students). One may suspect that these students come from internationally mobile families who primarily use English.Footnote 34
Table 6.11. Mean rankings of languages. The highest rank is “1.” Languages are ordered alphabetically.
| Ara | Ben | Eng | Hin | Mal | Per | Tag | Urd | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UAE | 1.58 | n.a. | 1.55 | 3.08 | 1.67 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 2.67 |
| Other | 1.97 | 3.09 | 1.38 | 2.89 | 2.41 | 2.75 | 2.33 | 2.45 |
| Total | 1.83 | 3.09 | 1.43 | 2.91 | 2.35 | 2.90 | 2.50 | 2.47 |
Table 6.12 details the individual responses for Arabic, English, Hindi, and Urdu (the most frequently reported languages) against the distinction of UAE and non-UAE citizens. With the exception of a mere seven responses, English was exclusively placed at ranks 1 and 2. A total of 402 out of the 692 students – a clear majority – positioned it at top rank.Footnote 35 Although this majority is driven by non-UAE students, 94 out of the total of 208 UAE students in the sample considered it the language they feel most proficient in. A total of 250 students reported their highest proficiency for Arabic, not English. Hindi and Urdu primarily occur at ranks 2 and 3.
Table 6.12. Absolute language rankings. The highest rank is “1.” Languages are ordered alphabetically.
| Rank | Arabic | English | Hindi | Urdu | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UAE | Other | UAE | Other | UAE | Other | UAE | Other | |
| 1 | 112 | 138 | 94 | 308 | 2 | 13 | ||
| 2 | 79 | 139 | 114 | 169 | 1 | 40 | 7 | 59 |
| 3 | 6 | 26 | 7 | 9 | 72 | 6 | 29 | |
| 4 | 4 | 29 | 2 | 17 | 2 | 14 | ||
| 5 | 4 | 11 | 6 | 3 | ||||
| 6 | 3 | |||||||
| n/a | 3 | 138 | 196 | 347 | 193 | 363 | ||
| Total | 208 | 484 | 208 | 484 | 208 | 484 | 208 | 484 |
Siemund et al. (Reference Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 101–103) further report the mean self-assessed proficiencies in the four CEFR domains (Council of Europe 2020) of spoken and written production as well as listening and reading comprehension. Measured across all students, they find slightly better assessments for English in comparison to Arabic. Moreover, the range of self-assessed proficiencies in Arabic is wider. Given the high share of international students at the American University of Sharjah, this is certainly expected. In addition, the authors examine the mean proficiencies for English and Arabic in the cohorts of Emirati students, South Asian students, and students from other areas. Here, the mean proficiency in Arabic is practically identical for Emirati students and students from other countries (advanced level). This makes sense since these other countries are often Arabic-speaking. Knowledge of Arabic reaches only intermediate values amongst South Asian students. As far as English is concerned, South Asian students score highest (near mastery) followed by students from other countries. These findings reveal something about the high status of English in South Asian countries. Emirati students consider themselves advanced speakers of English.
Just as in the case of Singapore in Section 6.3.2, it is also instructive to consider language use data. Figure 6.17 manifests a strong use of Arabic with and amongst parents and grandparents, but English overtakes as the primary medium of communication with siblings and best friends. Regarding the use of English, one can identify similar trends as in Singapore (recall Figure 6.6). Hindi and Urdu also play a role in the family domain, but are used less frequently with siblings and friends. The pattern is suggestive of an ongoing language shift to English.
Figure 6.17 Differences in language use (based on own project data).
The student data reported from here also permit a reconstruction of the attitudes towards English and Arabic along the dimensions of status and solidarity. The responses to the following three statements reveal interesting attitudinal differences.
1. Knowing English/Arabic will increase my opportunities to find employment.
2. Knowing English/Arabic is a significant part of my cultural identity.
3. I feel confident and secure when speaking English/Arabic.
As can be gleaned from Figure 6.18, English in the UAE is strong along the status dimension, but figures less prominently in terms of solidarity. Students associate a high economic value with it, but are divided about its significance in regard to their cultural identity. The inclusion of the background of the students would most certainly reveal further differences. Students also express great confidence in their English abilities (see also Leimgruber et al. 2022).
Figure 6.18 Attitudes to English and Arabic.
Knowledge of Arabic, in contrast, is associated with less economic opportunity, but greater cultural significance. Consider Figure 6.18 again. It stands to reason that a distinction between students from Arabic and non-Arabic-speaking countries would reveal additional differences. Students generally do not feel particularly confident when using Arabic, mirroring the results from the rankings and proficiencies discussed above.
In contrast to Singapore, English in the Gulf Region and the UAE in particular does not yet seem to be associated with a specific local identity. Arabic remains a very strong cultural and also religious anchor (Siemund et al. Reference Siemund and Leimgruber2021). This is consonant with the relatively short history of English in the area, the status of Arabic as the official language of the UAE, and the high mobility and diversity of the foreign population. For example, the sample of 692 students introduced above comprises citizenships of no fewer than 50 separate countries, notably the United Arab Emirates (208), India (105), Egypt (60), Pakistan (45), Syria (33), Saudi Arabia (31), Jordan (29), the United States (22), Palestine (20), Lebanon (20), Canada (15), and Iraq (10). This listing points to a complicated mix of native and non-native speakers. They use English as a lingua franca with comparably high proficiency levels, the specific properties of which will be followed up in Section 6.5.3. To be sure, this use of English cannot be representative of the situation in the UAE at large, but there are practically no studies that could be consulted here (see Siemund, Al-Issa & Leimgruber Reference Siemund, Al-Issa and Leimgruber2021).
6.5.3 English as a Lingua Franca and Gulf English
In the multilingual university campus context introduced above, the boundaries between English as a native language, as a second language, as a foreign language, as an additional language, and as a lingua franca begin to blur and become indistinct. It challenges the conceptual and definitional distinctions underlying these constructs (Filppula et al. Reference Filppula, Klemola, Mauranen and Vetchinnikova2017; Kecskes Reference Kecskes2019; Mauranen Reference Mauranen2018; McKay Reference McKay2002; Ricento Reference Ricento and Ricento2015c; Seidlhofer Reference Seidlhofer2004). The few (in fact only seven) monolingual native speakers of English are in a clear minority. Students from the UAE, as outlined in Section 6.5.2, can mostly be assumed to have acquired English as a late first or early second language. Students from other Arab countries are likely to have learnt English as a second or foreign language. For the South Asian students, English will be either a first, second, or additional language. One may recall that 402 out of the 692 students consider English as the language they feel most proficient in. Depending on who talks to whom, different interactional contexts arise. If this particular student population were to continue their lives on a remote and secluded island, a novel and distinct variety of English would probably quickly develop. However, since the student cohorts keep changing from term to term, the interactional context as a whole is leaning towards the use of English as lingua franca (ELF). Nevertheless, this ELF context is rather different from that found at European universities where ELF interactions are much less frequent. We are here witnessing the emergence of a new variety of English (Gulf English, UAE English) in its incipient stages that, due to the external circumstances, keeps being interrupted in its further development (Leimgruber & Siemund Reference Leimgruber, Siemund, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 12).
English lingua franca communication and interaction in one of the New Englishes overlap, as, at least for subgroups in territories where New Englishes are spoken (India, Nigeria, the Philippines, etc.), interaction in English is qualitatively similar to lingua franca communication. For example, speakers of Indian English may have learnt English relatively late in life and speak different first languages (say, Hindi and Malayalam). In regard to the emergence of Singapore English and Hong Kong English, the current situation in the UAE is reminiscent of these former colonial contexts during their early decades. English-medium universities like the University of Sharjah display parallels to the Raffles Institution (Singapore) and the Government Central School (Hong Kong) in the nineteenth century (see Sections 6.3.1 and 6.4.1). Levels of English can be assumed to have been high in these institutions, but these were certainly not representative of the wider population. The same can be said about the UAE today where interactional sequences like those in (8) can be frequently encountered.
| (8) | Gulf English (Parra-Guinaldo & Lanteigne Reference Parra-Guinaldo, Lanteigne, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 307–308) | ||
| a. | Want taxi Dubai you? | ||
| ‘Do you want a taxi to Dubai?’ | |||
| b. | Not good karak. | ||
| ‘The karak is not good.’ | |||
| c. | You can go the other room. There is one patient. | ||
| ‘We’ll use a different room because there’s a patient in this one.’ | |||
| d. | Next Friday I clean? Put water? Outside? | ||
| ‘Do you want me to clean the driveway next Friday using water?’ | |||
| e. | One madam telling. After pharmacy asking ‘this one’. | ||
| ‘One day a madam told me about this medicine. After that I asked the pharmacy if they had this one.’ | |||
According to Mauranen (Reference Mauranen2012: 8), English as a lingua franca is “a vehicular language used by speakers who do not share a first language.” Crucially, it is not their first or native language (see also Kecskes Reference Kecskes2019: 2). Lingua francas are primarily defined by reference to the specific communicative situations in which they are used, and not in terms of their linguistic properties. We will see below, however, that the communicative strategies employed by lingua franca speakers produce recurrent and identifiable linguistic phenomena. Mauranen (Reference Mauranen2012: 3–4) further points out that the same language may be a learner language and also be employed as a lingua franca. Situational and functional differences can be used to discriminate between the two (see also Seidlhofer Reference Seidlhofer2011).
Lingua franca communication produces a special type of language contact between what Mauranen (Reference Mauranen2012: 29) refers to as “similects,” understood as mutually intelligible idiolects influenced by the speakers’ L1 (or other) substrate. The background languages of the speakers thus always participate in lingua franca communications. This produces cases of second-order language contact, or contact between hybrids (Mauranen Reference Mauranen2012: 29). Adopting this perspective, numerous languages in fact interact in the campus situation described in Section 6.5.2, and by no means only English. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for similar language contact scenarios in other parts of the world and other eras. The degree of complexity of such situations increases with the number of languages involved, with multilingually raised lingua franca speakers contributing more complexity than their monolingually raised peers. In a similar way, linguistically highly diverse ecologies in which English is used as a lingua franca are more complex than those in which just two or three languages partake besides English.
As the primary aim of lingua franca speakers is to bring their message across – rather than standard English formal correctness, the communication process is characterized by a number of recurrent morpho-syntactic strategies that by and large result in a highly pragmatically organized code. Parra-Guinaldo and Lanteigne (Reference Parra-Guinaldo, Lanteigne, Siemund and Leimgruber2021), based on a self-compiled corpus of 179 naturalistic utterances containing 417 non-standard specimens, identify the processes shown and illustrated in Table 6.13. Omissions are very frequent and represent nearly half of all non-standard forms, whereas insertions and substitutions are relatively rare.
Table 6.13. Morpho-syntactic processes (Parra-Guinaldo & Lanteigne Reference Parra-Guinaldo, Lanteigne, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 308–309).
| Process | Example | Gloss |
|---|---|---|
| Omission | Put boxes where? | Where should I put the boxes? |
| Before cake yellow colour. | The cake you made before was yellow. | |
| Problem not mine. | This is not my problem. | |
| Insertion | Trust you make. | Trust me. |
| What’s the hell is going on? | What the hell is going on? | |
| Substitution | Me want return. | I want a refund. |
| Wrap you make. | Can you wrap the item? |
These morpho-syntactic processes target a number of salient grammatical categories, particularly those identified in Table 6.14. Here, we see differences in the use of the progressive and the past tense, dislocations, invariant negative particles, and non-standard expressions of number and agreement. The question in topicalized declarative form (Yogurt you don’t want?) is reminiscent of Indian English (see Siemund Reference Siemund2013: 242).
Table 6.14. Morpho-syntactic categories (Parra-Guinaldo & Lanteigne Reference Parra-Guinaldo, Lanteigne, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 310–312).
By and large, the processes and categories described in Tables 6.13 and 6.14 have also been observed in other ELF contexts (Mauranen Reference Mauranen2012; Seidlhofer Reference Seidlhofer2004). Parra-Guinaldo and Lanteigne (Reference Parra-Guinaldo, Lanteigne, Siemund and Leimgruber2021: 318) make the laudable attempt to contrast their data with findings from other ELF encounters and are able to identify various non-standard specimens that appear unique to the UAE context.Footnote 36 It remains to be seen, however, whether these are sufficiently concrete to define a distinct form of Gulf or UAE English.
Before closing this chapter, let us briefly take up again the question of putative linguistic advantages of multilingual over monolingual speakers, as described inter alia in Agustín-Llach (Reference Agustín-Llach2019), Bialystok (Reference Bialystok2001, Reference Bialystok, Miller, Bayram, Rothman and Serratrice2018), Cenoz (Reference Cenoz2013b), Maluch et al. (Reference Maluch, Kempert, Neumann and Stanat2015), and Maluch, Neumann and Kempert (Reference Maluch, Neumann and Kempert2016). The extensively multilingual ELF context encountered in the UAE could give rise to the hypothesis that those speakers with strongly multilingual backgrounds are in fact the more versatile ELF users. This hypothesis connects to the discussion of self-assessments of language proficiencies in Chapter 4. Based on Mueller (Reference Mueller, Bonnet and Siemund2018) as well as Siemund and Mueller (Reference Siemund, Mueller, Mauranen and Vetchinnikova2021), it was shown that multilingually raised ELF users provide stronger self-assessments regarding their English proficiencies in comparison to their monolingually raised peers (measured across all CEFR domains). A preliminary analysis of the data collected at the University of Sharjah indeed confirms this hypothesis. Students with a multilingual background rate their English proficiencies higher relative to students with a monolingual background, but this initial comparison warrants a separate study.
6.5.4 Summary
It may not be entirely adequate to consider Gulf English (UAE English) as another postcolonial New English, but I cannot resist the temptation to position it within Schneider’s (2003, 2007) Dynamic Model. Of the five stages distinguished there, that is, (i) foundation, (ii) exonormative stabilization, (iii) nativization, (iv) endonormative stabilization, and (v) differentiation, we can readily rule out stages four and five. The information provided in the preceding sections as well as my personal experience gathered in the UAE supports the idea of incipient nativization, as English represents a very natural part of the local multilingual ecology. In fact, one cannot successfully navigate the UAE without English. Nevertheless, all official language use in the administration or the education system is under strong exonormative pressure, with American English being the most important point of reference. There are as yet no signs of endonormative stabilization.
6.6 Chapter Summary
Chapter 6 aimed to illustrate the major themes of the present book – globalization, migration, urban areas, multilingual advantages, cross-linguistic influence, language acquisition and learning, language policies, identities, and attitudes – in the context of the New Englishes where interaction between multilingual speakers is abundant. The concepts and categories introduced and developed through Chapters 1–5 were applied to specific multilingual ecologies that demonstrate their relevance and mutual dependence. Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates served as three case studies.
The comparison of the multilingual ecologies of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai revealed important commonalities, but also crucial differences. There is extensive linguistic diversity in all three cities, but Dubai stands out in terms of density and transience. It is also the youngest multilingual global city of the three. Singapore became an independent country in 1965 and has made significant investments into organizing its multilingual ecology since. The linguistic texture of Singapore has become less diverse and more homogeneous within the bounds of its bilingual model. Hong Kong never achieved independence, but was returned to China in 1997 as a former colonial possession. It remains to be seen what happens to its long-lasting Cantonese–English bilingualism under the new Biliterate and Trilingual language policy (BT policy). With Singapore English – including its colloquial variety, the city state of Singapore has developed its own marker of national identity.
Multilingual contexts shaped by international migration, such as Dubai, pose new challenges for established models describing the global spread of English. Essential to Schneider’s (Reference Schneider2003, Reference Schneider2007) Dynamic Model is the distinction between a settler strand (the colonizers), on the one hand, and an indigenous strand (the colonized), on the other (Schneider Reference Schneider2003: 242). Apart from international investment as perhaps the modern equivalent of former physical settling, there is no distinguishable settler strand in Dubai or the UAE. Instead, we find an indigenous strand in the form of the local Arab population and a highly internally stratified international migration strand. There are in fact several migration strands. Further reflection reveals that the assumption of three separate strands is also necessary for adequately describing the early multilingual ecology of Singapore. The Malay represent the indigenous strand sensu stricto, while the Chinese and the Indian population groups form the most important migration strands. Most Cantonese people in Hong Kong are descendants of former immigrants, although their area of origin was the nearby Guangdong Province. The assumption of just two strands, indigenous and settler, works best for the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. In these locales, the early settler and indigenous strands were only much later complemented by newly arriving international migration strands. In sum, I here see the need for a model that incorporates immigrants as a separate strand, especially as they bring in their own varieties of English.
