Here is a bit of free PR advice: When formulating social policy, don't use situation comedies as a proxy for reality. You will look dumb.

Six years after the humor was boiled out of what was then Singapore's funniest sitcom by government decree, the “Speak Good English” campaign is still identified with the government's tilt at fictional construction contractor Phua Chu Kang. (Yes, I know “Singapore's funniest sitcom” doesn't mean much, but work with me.) In 1999, blinded by an apparently congenital inability to differentiate satire from reality, the Singapore government told the producers of the sitcom Phua Chu Kang to tone down the Singlish slang that had driven much of the show's humor. Apparently they hadn't learned from Dan Quayle's disastrous 1992 tilt at Murphy Brown in the USA, later wickedly used on the show itself. Note to politicians: Sitcom writers are smarter than you are. That's why they get paid more. Don't antagonize them.

Of course, the Singapore government has rather more creative control than the US government does, so, in the context of the show, Phua Chu Kang was duly enrolled in the Singapore government's BEST remedial English program. To this day that stands as one of the darkest moments for comedy in world history (up there with Ishtar). In a 2001 speech (see paragraph 9), then Deputy Prime Minister (now PM) Lee Hsien Loong justified government comedy intervention based on Singapore's small size, and consequent status as linguistic flotsam unworthy of its own dialect.

This justification didn't stop Singapore from being the butt of the usual mocking, international press coverage of the kind that has wrongly convinced the world that Singapore is like a boiled Petri dish: no culture. Singaporean exile satirist Colin Goh also wrote eloquently and wittily about the anti-Singlish drive in 2002. Goh has collected the definitive catalogue of Singlish at his Talking Cock website. Have a look. The Hokkien (Fujianese) dialect may be finest language for profanity ever to abuse the ears of man.

Well, there is no horse so dead that it can't be flogged again, and the old Singlish chestnut is back. The 2005 incarnation of the “Speak Good English” campaign was inaugurated a couple of weeks ago. To kick-off the campaign, PM Lee gave a speech at the headquarters of Singapore's Housing Development Board, in which he said:

“I recently met the son of an Australian friend of mine. The young man had just graduated from a very good school in Melbourne. I asked him if he had any schoolmates from Singa­pore. He said there were a few. He then commented that they spoke a strange type of English among themselves. It sounded like English, but he could not make out the meaning at all. In fact, they were speaking Singlish! My friend observed that they did not seem to distinguish between ‘no’ and ‘not’. It took me a little while to think of an example in Singlish – 'Money No Enough'!”

Horrors! An Aussie couldn't understand a bunch of Singaporeans bullshitting among themselves. The Australia-Singapore axis upon which World civilization and trade rest is clearly doomed. Talking Cock has nicely savaged this statement on their website. Nevertheless, I guess we won't be seeing Singlish in movie titles any more. (As well as a Singlish phrase, Money No Enough is a film by Singaporean auteur Jack Neo. There are other examples of Singlish in movie titles.)

The PM went on to say:

“So I believe we should all make the effort, and consciously speak good English – at home, at work, or in social gatherings.  Speaking good English does not mean using bombastic words or adopting an artificial English or American accent.  We can speak in the normal Singapore tone, which is neutral and intelligible.  But speak in full sentences, with proper sentence structure, and cutting out all the ‘lahs’ and ‘lors’ at the end of each sentence.”

The “normal” Singapore tone is an artificial construction brought about by the government wrenching the population first into speaking English, and then into Mandarin, which is not a native Singaporean dialect. (Singaporeans are largely of southern and south-eastern Chinese extraction, and the household dialects --Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, etc.-- reflect that.) I have no complaints with the government's past decisions to foster linguistic unity, which has helped Singapore in several ways. But the normal tone, a government creation, should not be confused with the natural tone, which is a complex and distinct weave of languages and tones that is completely unmistakeable and perfectly captures the linguistic and ethnic mix that is Singapore's heritage.

I don't want to further retread ground that Colin Goh, an actual Singaporean, has already nicely paved. But I have a few thoughts to add. Singapore does have an issue with the quality of its written English. When I was working in PR there, we had a hard time finding people who could write good English. People who could speak and write good Mandarin were equally scarce, which was an issue since we worked in both languages. The young, highly-educated Singaporeans we were talking to were trapped between the English that many of them grew up with and the Mandarin that ethnic Chinese Singaporeans are required to study in school. (Often with a household dialect such as Cantonese or Hokkien thrown in for good measure.) Torn between two languages, they had truly mastered neither.

As I've learned some Mandarin, I have discovered that Singlish is, at heart, an English/Chinese/Malay patois lying over Chinese grammar. So perhaps the Singapore government's obsession with schooling its young in Mandarin is actually contributing to the problem.

My wife is Singaporean. She has a marvelous capacity to switch, on-the-fly, between the Queen's English and gutter Singlish as the situation demands (it does give me whiplash when she does this). I suspect the same is true of many contemporary Singaporeans, including the young students cited in the speech above. My wife is also highly educated and comes from a middle class family where English is the first language. Perhaps, where Singlish is a problem, it is more a class issue than a culture one. Certainly the Chinese/English linguistic divide increasingly appears to be class-related (think heartlanders vs. cosmopolitans). The government might do well to focus on that rather than exhorting people who are already capable of perfectly good English to mind their elocution, and wringing the Singlish out of pop-culture.

As a foreigner with a deep attachment to Singapore, I appreciate Singlish. It is unique, expressive and colorful. It sounds like no other dialect I have ever heard. After nine years in Singapore, the rhythm and cadence of Singlish means more to me than a thorn in the Singapore government's side. It means home.

Bonus pop-culture quiz: What do Dustin Hoffman, star of Ishtar, and Jack Neo, director of Money No Enough, have in common? No Googling.

Update: Peking Duck has pointed out the Wikipedia article on Singlish. It is the most scholarly analysis of Singlish I have ever seen. Well worth a look.