ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to cover two related topics. First, it surveys a Singapore English research tradition that dates from the mid-1970s to the present, which includes not only the description of distinctive features at various levels of language, but also the engagement with the ideological dimensions of Singapore English and ‘Singlish’. Second, the chapter also reports on the authors’ own empirical quantitative and qualitative (social network) research on the language practices of young people in Singapore, where the use of English co-occurs with various types of language mixing among the three dominant ethnic groups, the Singaporean Chinese, Singaporean Malays, and Singaporean Indians. The findings of our research indicate that the vernaculars (in Labovian terms) for many young Singaporeans are forms of speech that include complex patterns of code-mixing and code-switching, despite the fact that such forms of language mixing have previously been largely ignored in the Singapore research literature.
