The following was published by the Sunday Times on 21 October 2007:
Sunday Times 21 Oct 2007
A Tale of Twisted Tongues in Taiwan
by Colin Goh
The Wife and I are in Taipei, where tonight, our film, Singapore Dreaming, will be having its Taiwanese premiere at the Women Make Waves Film Festival, ahead of a commercial theatrical release in a couple of weeks. We’re a little chuffed, as it’ll be the first Singapore movie since 2002’s ‘I Not Stupid’ to get a commercial release here, and also because we’ll be sharing a distributor with Hou Hsiao Hsien, one of our filmmaking idols.
It’s our first time in Taiwan, and we’re feeling a wee bit strange, because there’s so much that we’re finding familiar as Singaporeans, and yet, the slight variations make the differences really jump out. For example, the popular oyster omelette that Singaporeans refer to as ‘oh luak’ or ‘oh jian’ is called ‘e-a jian’ here. (Pronounced ‘uh-ah jian’.) And it’s served with sauce on top. For overseas Singaporeans like us, Taipei is a refracted view of home.
Perhaps the biggest difference is hearing Hokkien (or ‘Hoklo’ as it’s referred to here) spoken everywhere, even in the mass media. Unlike Singapore, Hoklo is not only not restricted, it’s positively flourishing under the current government.
But it’s not the same Hokkien that our friendly neighbourhood ah bengs speak. Hoklo may share the same roots, but according to linguistics experts, it’s become a distinct language by itself, with a unique vocabulary, distinct philology and even sub-dialects of its own. We had a personal brush with this when we encountered the local equivalent of a seven-syllable epithet involving the genitalia of one’s maternal parent that is well-known to all Singaporeans, especially those who have undergone national service. The Hoklo counterpart, you might be interested to know, has only six syllables. (As this is a family paper, I won’t tell you which one.)
The Taiwanese were similarly intrigued by the linguistic variation in the dialogue in Singapore Dreaming. In every press interview or event, there was genuine interest about our Hokkien, and especially our Singlish. We were really caught off-guard by this. We never thought of Singlish as a marketing point, as we’d assumed that Taiwanese audiences would all just be reading the perfectly grammatical Mandarin subtitles, so the Singlish dialogue would be bypassed as mere babble. But we were wrong. Everyone wanted to talk about it.
When giving a talk at a local university, the entire English and Linguistics department turned up to quiz us about Singlish. Far from dismissing it as inferior, one professor lamented how the Taiwanese equivalent had not evolved as much as Singlish; it didn’t even have a name. “Taiwanglish?” he ventured. “Taiglish?” In his classroom, he uses vernacular English to make English come alive for his students, and thus make it easier to teach its variance with standard grammar. Another professor also said he felt having a vernacular English was evidence of a creative populace. A few students even expressed jealousy that we had Singlish, just as China had Chinglish, and Latin America Spanglish. They started talking about wanting to document their very own “-glish”.
While we are proud Singlish advocates, when we’re overseas, we are always careful to talk about how Singapore’s emphasis on maintaining grammatical English through campaigns such as the Speak Good English Movement has also helped Singaporeans engage in the global flow of business and people. When we brought this up, however, the academics began debating whether the title ‘Speak Good English Movement’ was, in fact, grammatical.
The fascination with Singaporean language continued during radio interviews, where the hosts got really excited about how we don’t use ‘shichang’ for market, but rather, ‘basha’ or ‘pasat’, which we inherited from the Persian ‘bazaar’, by way of Malay. And everyone got into a linguistic lather when it was discovered that ‘soap’ in both Hokkien and Hoklo is ‘sabun’, which is derived from the Portuguese. Said one host, “It’s so fascinating that you can trace the history of a people, just by looking at its language.”
We’re often made to feel that our hybrid language is something about which we should be embarrassed. Our unexpected experience here in Taiwan, however, has reinforced my belief that it is actually a cultural asset, because it makes us unique and interesting in a way that say, having very clean streets can’t. After all, for us, it’s opened doors, initiated conversations and even invited envy abroad. Not bad for a chapalang tongue, leh!
On Tuesday, Singapore Dreaming will be competing at the Tokyo International Film Festival for the Best Asian/Middle Eastern Film Award.
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