E-Ching Ng teaches Singlish to Yale-NUS Faculty

Our Ph.D. student E-Ching Ng recently gave a Singlish lesson to the Yale-NUS faculty. Colloquial Singaporean English, or Singlish as it is more popularly called, is a radically restructured variety of English. Topics covered included syntactic elision, tonal assignment, discourse particles, vocabulary and etiquette. More than a dozen Singaporeans acted as teaching assistants, performing excerpts from the play Cooling-Off Day by Alfian bin Sa’at, and acting as conversation partners to help participants translate theory into practice. The event was co-sponsored by ROJAK, a Yale-NUS faculty reading group, and the Malaysian and Singaporean Association (MASA). To quote the organizers, “Everyone from Yale-NUS had a rollicking good time.” For more information, click here.