Linguistic insecurity in Singapore through the lens of lingual voice quality settings

This thesis examines the voice quality setting of the tongue when Singaporeans speak with a fellow Singaporean as opposed to a traditionally “native” speaker of inner-circle English. In so doing, we hope to add to the discourse surrounding Singaporean English by considering how the ethnicity of our interlocutor alone may or may not cause Singaporeans to change the way we speak. By means of a lingual ultrasound, tongue imaging data was gathered from five Singaporean female undergraduates and their tongue contours during interspeech posture were then analyzed with Generalized Additive Mixed Modelling (GAMM). When comparing the lingual voice quality settings when speaking with both ethnicities, this study found no statistically significant difference. It appears that speech context exerted a strong confounding force on any initial differences found. The lack of statistically significant differences suggests that there are more factors to consider when Singaporeans consciously or unconsciously alter our manner of speaking. This may in turn provide further insights into the complex manifestation of linguistic insecurity amongst Singaporeans.Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and Multilingual Studie