Me Singlish Damn Powerful One, Ah?

“You buy now,” says the girl in the shoe shop. “You buy now.”

It’s less a question than a statement, less a statement than a command, and almost — not quite — enough to tip me into buying the shoes straight away.

I will gain, in fact, approximately ten pounds in Singapore just through a Pavlovian response to similar instructions from food cart owners whenever I stop to inspect their greasy, enticing wares.

In this instance, however, British diffidence triumphs. “Umm…” I begin. “I’m still, err, deciding. Maybe later?”

She finds this, not surprisingly, hard to follow.

It’s a well-known factoid that everyone in Singapore speaks English. It is not, however, true.

English is one of four official languages of Singapore — the messages on its fast, efficient metro service ring out in English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil, and signs extend to encompass four languages and three scripts.

You’ll hear a welter of other Indian and Chinese languages in addition to these.

Almost all Singaporeans speak Singlish. It’s the island’s lingua franca.

But it’s only the most educated who speak what Americans, British and Antipodeans would recognise as English.

And, yes. There is a difference.

You’d think (well, I did, anyway) that a nation like Singapore, less than half the size of the Greater London area, with no fewer than four national languages for under five million people, would be linguistically blessed.

But this cultural polyglotism is a very mixed blessing.

Great when you’re educated. A real loss when you’re not.

In Coffee Bar K, a slick Japanese bar where you can buy anything from Pétrus to cask whisky, I get chatting to a Singaporean trader, who switches seamlessly between English with me, Mandarin with his friend and Singlish with the Japanese bartender, and also has a couple of Chinese languages and good Bahasa under his belt.

It’s not unusual for educated Singaporeans to speak Mandarin, Cantonese and English with educated fluency, often another Chinese dialect or two as well as that, and even Bahasa or another European language on top — as well, of course, as Singlish.

Which is, IMHO, a rather fabulous language in its own right.

What’s Singlish?

Well, it’s a creole version of English. Much of its grammatical structure comes from Chinese — with tense indicators such as “now” used in place of verbal changes such as “can” to “could”.

A lot of its emphasis words — “lah”, “leh”, “wah” — come from Bahasa and Chinese languages.

And its vocabulary is drawn from pretty much all the myriad Asian languages ever spoken in Singapore.

It’s a rat-a-tat staccato spiel with its own poetry, motion and emphasis, spoken super-fast, and super-compressed.

“Me go now, wait for you, lah?”

“Can anot?” (Will you or won’t you?)

There’s nothing linguistically impoverished about Singlish.

The problem is the government’s focus on Standard English.

Two generations back, many Singaporeans who spoke Chinese languages such as Hakka or Hokkien, and some who spoke Indian languages too, made the call — in the absence of a Chinese language education system — to raise their children as English speakers.

That’s speakers of Standard English.

A language which the parents did not speak themselves.

So some of these kids — my generation — grew up speaking basic Hakka or Hokkien with their grandparents, and a phenomenally flawed, impoverished English with their parents.

Rather than growing up bilingual, or polylingual, they grew up with partial fluency in two languages — but fluency in neither.

And many are now raising their own children in the English that they do not really speak.

At playgrounds I hear the sort of stilted, awkward dog-English conversations that I’ve only ever heard from pushy mothers endeavouring to raise their toddlers “bilingual” by talking to them in appalling, schoolgirl French.

But these mothers don’t have another language to revert to. That’s just, well, how they speak.

It’s a funny old place, Singapore.

And, no, I don’t buy those shoes.

But I do buy a different pair, at almost the speed of Singlish.