Posts Tagged ‘Singapore English and Singlish’

My final paper for my sociolinguistics class is due in less than a week.  Over the past two or maybe three weeks, I’ve been collecting articles and books on Singapore English and Singlish: on its phonetics, phonology, morphology; on policies, governmental and popular attitudes; on its place in Singapore and its place in the world as a world English.  I currently have about 90 sources, and, of course, I won’t be able to get to all of them by next week.  I’d be more than satisfied if I managed to tackle even a quarter of them for my paper.

On Sunday, I went to Davis Library and checked out Language as commodity: Global structures, local marketplaces, edited by Peter K. W. Tan and Rani Rubdy (I definitely have a couple of articles by Rubdy sitting in my collection, and perhaps one by Tan).  I flipped through the book and checked out the Singapore articles and recognized two of the three names (Lionel Wee and Lubna Alsagoff), as I have a number of their articles on my computer.

A little while ago, I subscribed to the LINGUIST List listserv which, I think, is generally meant for actual linguists in the field and not undergraduates, although a few conferences here and there are open to undergraduates.  In any case, yesterday, I got in my inbox an e-mail detailing the table of contents for the latest issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics.  In the book reviews section?  A review for Language as commodity by Gregory P. Glasgow.  I literally did a double-take; I’d just checked out the book and read a few chapters from it.

But this feeling—recognizing names, recognizing titles, feeling integrated—is just really amazing.  It’s a whole new sense of fulfillment.  And I love it.  I feel like I could belong in this field, that I could really connect and do something.  A good chunk of the articles I’ve been collecting on Singapore English have been written by professors at the National University of Singapore, where I was during the summer; everything just feels so much within my reach when I realize that these professors are really only a step or two removed from me, that I can actually, potentially, have contact with people in this field.

It’s just a great feeling, knowing that I can accomplish things and that I can be part of something academic.  That, hey, academia isn’t as unknowable as I first thought it would be.