Cultural Hybrids

Throughout the world, and throughout history, whenever cultures or languages meet, hybrids or foreign language assimilation will occur, and it will evolve. Just look at the English language as we know it today, how many words have their origin in Latin, German and French. When these 'foreign' words were first used in English, it would sound similarly like a 'multilingual' Singaporean of today: multilingual, as in multilingual sentences. I don't believe this is uniquely to Singapore. But somehow, like Singlish, it is just deemed, wrong – and sadly, not acknowledged even amongst Singaporeans as a unique part of our culture. Yes, it is part of our culture. You want to call it wrong, go ahead. I call it being who we are – being Singaporean.

Somehow, in Singapore, when we do things differently, we feel we are not doing it right: not different. Whereas in other cultures, being different is – plainly – different, and often people feel unashamedly proud to be different. Is it because we are a small and insignificant culture, and therefore it doesn't make sense to speak of culture with such a minute population? Or is this mentality a legacy from our colonial past? You don't decide what's right or wrong for you, some superior being will do that for you!

For many of us, our work and daily lives revolves around Singaporeans mainly – so this multilingual switching is not a problem usually. For some though, whose work meant dealing with foreigners or traveling to foreign lands, admittedly, it can be ... curiously interesting on some occasions.

Yes, there is a need to be purely proficient when the language we inherited is widely used throughout the world. And we do need to respect the fact that international communication is a lot more pervasive these days, and we do need to be understood by other user who also use the language that we have inherited. But do we need to view our uniqueness as a defect that we urgently need to purge? I'm just not too sure about that.