A distinctive feature of Asian Englishes: Particles lah!
Columnist’s note: Today’s column is written by my first guest columnist, Dr. Lisa Lim, a great linguist and dear friend whose scholarship and character have been an inspiration to me, especially as a columnist. She is a leading scholar in world Englishes, particularly Asian Englishes, and is distinguished around the world for the topic she wrote in today’s column.
TO the delight of audiences, Singapore English — fondly known as Singlish — was featured at Taylor Swift’s recent Eras Tour concerts on the bridge of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” Ms. Swift regularly uses a call-and-response opportunity with her line, “Like, we are never getting back together.” In her six Singapore concerts in March, instead of the usual response of “Like, ever,” her backup dancer’s reply is a different, well-loved Singlish phrase each night. This includes “no lah!” “siao ah!” and “walao eh!”
“Siao” is Hokkien for “crazy,” while “walao” is an exclamation expressing annoyance, disbelief, exasperation or surprise, akin to “my goodness” or “oh dear.” Its origins lie in Hokkien/ Teochew, where “wa” is the firstperson pronoun, here meaning “my,” and “lao” could mean “elder, father” — thus: “my father!” — though “lao” is more likely is a euphemistic form of a word referring to the male organ.
And the particles used — “lah,” “ah” and “eh” — are indeed one of the most distinctive features of Singlish. Lah was perhaps the first instance of Singlish featured on merchandise like T-shirts in the early 1990s and, as a colloquial Singapore English (and Malaysian English) particle, had enough currency to have merited inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1997. So it was not surprising that these would have caught the attention of and be appropriated by Taylor Swift’s creative team.
In fact, many languages in Asia — which readers will be familiar with — such as Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin, Malay, Tagalog and Hindi, have particles as a typological feature, which are used widely in these languages to communicate various pragmatic functions. These include speech act types, such as questions, assertions and requests; evidentiality, showing the source of knowledge; and affective and emotional coloring.
Moreover, particles make up a discourse-prominent feature and, as a distinctive category of lexical items, are consequently very easily transferred in contact-induced change. Thus, again, it should come as no surprise that, in ecologies where the substrate languages have particles in their grammars, such particles emerge as an outcome of language-contact dynamics, as a characteristic feature in the contact English variety. My collaborator Umberto Ansaldo and I have regularly emphasized how particles from Asian language typologies are ubiquitous and robust features of those contact varieties of Englishes.
To offer an example close to the hearts of this newspaper’s readers, many of Tagalog’s 18 enclitic particles occur frequently in Philippine English. Lim JooHyuk and Ariane Borlongan’s work in 2011 documents examples from the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-PH), which attest to the consistent usage of Tagalog particles in Philippine English. For instance: “We have an idea na of who we’ll get yeah pero we’re waiting pa for the approval,” where “na” signals a relatively new or altered situation, while “pa” denotes a relatively old or continuing situation, just as they do in Tagalog.
Particles of a contact language variety in a multilingual ecology may, of course, have sources in more than one of the diverse substrate languages in the ecology. These source languages may be teased out using a triangulated investigation of (i) the particles’ forms and functions in the substrate languages, (ii) the dating of their appearance in the contact variety, and (iii) the substrate language’s dominance in the ecology during a particular era, due to significant historical, social and/or political events which elevated a community or language. Singapore English’s two well-established particles, lah and ah (and also the what particle), emerged in the early years of the development of Singapore English during precolonial and colonial eras, with their origins in Malay and/or Hokkien, languages which were prominent as interethnic lingua franche in Singapore’s ecology then. A second, larger set of particles — hor, leh, lor, ma and meh — emerged in Singapore English in a later period, in the 1980s. These stemmed from a different source, namely Cantonese, which had prominence in Singapore’s ecology in the latter part of the 20th century due to immigration patterns, as well as popular culture.
Cantonese is, indeed, a language that is considered to be especially rich in particles, with some 30 basic forms (or more than 200 if all variants are counted!), and, as already mentioned for Singapore, such particles do appear prominently in contact languages with Cantonese in their ecology.
Clear examples are seen in Hong Kong English: “How are you a33?” in Katherine Chen’s Multilingual Hong Kong Corpus, and “may be LG1 is much better wor … noisy ma… at G/F... also u seem used to study there ma” in Gregory James’ data of Hong Kong students’ emails. And my own work in the 2000s on Singapore English particles (from the Grammar of Spoken
Singapore English Corpus, part of ICESIN) showcases a delectable range from Cantonese, including: “My parents old fashion a21? Then your parents le55?” where “le55” indicates a comparative meaning, and “No la21! He’s using Pirelli, you don’t know me55?” with “me55” indicating incredulity.
What is worth special notice is that such Cantonese particles in these Englishes have been acquired not only with the exact same meaning and segmental form but also with their original lexical tone (as indicated above using pitch level numbers, where 21 indicates a low falling tone, 33 a mid-level tone and 55 a high-level tone). This is again unsurprising, not only because Cantonese’s tone system is rich in quantity and quality, and thus a salient typological feature, but also because suprasegmental features such as tone are very susceptible to being acquired in contact situations.
The bigger and important issue here for world Englishes is the recognition that the typologies of such contact varieties of English can — and do — comprise features like particles and tone, even if these are not part of the typology of what is traditionally considered “English.” In consideration of New Englishes in multilingual, typologically diverse ecologies, such as Asian (and also African) Englishes, our scholarship of what constitutes “English” thus needs revisiting and revising.
Finally, language, use and attitudes evolve; this is true with particles, too. In 2012, I observed how Singapore English particles were starting to be increasingly used in more formal contexts. This suggested that they were acquiring wider sociolinguistic currency and acceptance. In 2015, Singlish, including the particle lah — in an about-turn from the Singapore government’s Speak Good English Movement of the 2000s, which discouraged the use of Singlish — was showcased prominently in Singapore’s 50th National Day Parade floats and endorsed on the Singaporean prime minister’s social media.
And new particles continue to emerge: the particle “sia” appeared on the Singlish scene in the late 2010s — for emphasis, surprise or shock — a possible evolution of the originally colloquial Malay swear word “sial.” Who knows, perhaps in a future concert, another response to “Like, we are never getting back together” will be “Sad sia!” Dr. Lisa Lim is dean, international, of the Faculty of Humanities and associate professor in the School of Education of Curtin University in Perth, Australia. She is also an honorary associate of the Department of Linguistics, School of Literature, Art, & Media, at the University of Sydney and an honorary associate professor at the School of English of the University of Hong Kong. She also writes a column, also called “Language Matters,” in the Post Magazine of the South China Morning Post.