LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF SINGAPORE COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH FOUND IN A LOCAL ENGLISH-LANGUAGE MOVIE ENTITLED SINGAPORE DREAMING

Abstract

Singapore Colloquial English (SCE/ Singlish) is an indigenized variety of English spoken in Singapore existing alongside the Standard Singapore English (SSE) (Leimgruber, 2011). The former is used in informal circumstances, while the later is used in high-levelformality situations. Singlish is actually a result of English that is learned as an official language and a medium of instruction in education influenced by many Mandarin, Cantonese, or Malay grammatical structures, phonetic features, and lexicons (Terry, 2000). Its owndialects and unique linguistic features have made this language variety appealing to be investigated. Researching Singlish in its genuine geographical context in which it is spoken will be less feasible for the researcher. Therefore, a local English-language movie entitled Singapore Dreaming (2006) is selected as the corpus of the study.