‘Steady lah!’ : Singlish for solidarity

Although thought to be “the ‘glue’ that binds Singaporeans together” (Cavallaro & Ng, 2009, p. 154), Singaporeans rank Singlish relatively low for solidarity in matched guise tests (Cavallaro & Ng, 2009; Cavallaro et al., 2014), and “the prestige of [Singlish] may, in fact, be entirely too covert for matched-guise detection” (Cavallaro et al., 2014, p. 395). To investigate if Singlish truly marks solidarity for Singaporeans, this paper draws from past solidarity research from different academic fields and analyses conversation data to assess Singlish for its solidarity building functions. Quantitative analyses revealed Singlish is used more readily between friends than strangers, and its most salient linguistic features of solidarity are discourse particles, expletives, indirect speech acts and address terms. Qualitative analysis showed other linguistic phenomena such as humour and loanwords draw from core solidarity attributes to strengthen interpersonal bonds. Borrowings from other languages are especially significant as ethnicity was found to have no effect on the use of Singlish to express solidarity as well, suggesting Singlish is a “colourblind” language variety in Singapore. Rather than divide Singaporeans, different ethnicities and their associated languages make Singlish a powerful language for solidarity building.Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and Multilingual Studie