Ethnicity and Tone Production on Singlish Particles

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5900534
AutoresYing Qi Soh (Nanyang Technological University), Junwen Lee (0000-0002-8233-7672, Nanyang Technological University), Ying‐ying Tan (0000-0002-9880-4968, Nanyang Technological University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen7
Número3
Páginas243
Fecha de publicación2022-09-19
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLanguages (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
EditorialMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages7030243
OpenAlexW4296345895
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas26

Recent research on Singlish, also known as Colloquial Singapore English, suggests that it is subject to ethnic variation across the three major ethnic groups in Singapore, namely Chinese, Malay, and Indian. Discourse particles, said to be one of the most distinctive features of the language, are nevertheless commonly used by bilinguals across all three ethnic groups. This study seeks to determine whether there are ethnic differences in the pitch contours of Singlish discourse particles produced by Singlish speakers. Four hundred and forty-four tokens of three Singlish particles, sia24, meh55, and what21, produced by the three groups of English-speaking bilingual speakers were drawn from the National Speech Corpus, and the pitch contours extracted and normalized. Statistical analysis of the overall pitch contours, the three acoustic parameters of mean pitch, pitch range, and pitch movement, and the variability of these parameters showed that the effect of ethnicity on the three acoustic parameters was not statistically significant and that the pitch contours of each particle were generally similar across ethnic groups. The results of this study suggest that Singlish may be acquired as a first language by Singaporean speakers, pre-empting any ethnic differences in the production of the particles that might otherwise have resulted from the speakers' differing language repertoires

Ethnic group · Linguistics · Malay · Physics · Sociology · Standard English · Tone (literature · Variation (astronomy · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology