some months ago, one of the popular radio shows featured some of the contestants from the fhm girl-next-door contest taking their bras off, and i knew that some people have put up videos of this show online. today, i was finally bored enough to get a hold of these videos to see for myself how bad this whole thing that has caused such a huge scandal is. well, the funny thing is, the whole taking off of the bra thing should not be the most appalling factor in the videos. instead, people should be more concerned with the level of spoken english used by these contestants. it brings to mind two things: 1. brawns do not go with brains; you can either have boobs or brains (of which most of the girls had neither); and 2. singaporeans can't speak english. okay, i know the latter is a pretty harsh statement that most of us would rather spend our entire lives trying to deny, bringing in proof of the high standard of written english singaporean students produce compared to their native-speaking american counterparts. but really, take anyone off the street to make a coherent statement on a simple subject, and more often than not, you'll be disappointed.
i am of the opinion that it's not a case of the lack of linguistic talent. rather, it's the attitude that most singaporeans have about speaking good english on a daily basis. and this goes beyond embracing singlish, which has become a part of the singaporean culture and identity. instead, many people have allowed their spoken english to transform into a language of laziness, substituting real words with sounds, abbreviations (as what we use for online messaging), bad grammar and flawed syntax. as such, we not only have a "peculiar" accent, but also an unintelligible way of speaking. i am not trying to be a know-all prude here mind you, in fact, i am ashamed to admit that i am sometimes guilty of the same charge. and while it is perfectly acceptable to speak this way within the singaporean context, (in fact one is often deemed pretentious when speaking in another, more orthodox way), once taken out from our comfort zone into another english-speaking society, our flawed speech is magnified by a thousand times.
now even if we were to preserve singlish as part of our daily speech, are we justified in neglecting the usage of complete sentences and proper grammar in conveying our thoughts and intentions? instead of saying "don't be like this lah!" (which is singlish), should we make it worse by saying "don't like this lah!"? no wonder fascinated "angmohs" who try to emulate singlish-speaking by adding "lah" at the end of every sentence never seem to succeed, since the rest of their sentences were too proper to begin with.
the only worrying thing about this phenomenon is the fact that our current and future generation of youths will find it a great challenge to convince the rest of the world that we can be both intelligent workers and eloquent speakers. accent aside, the least we can do is to try to put all those english lessons we had as children into good use, on a daily basis.
though it is ironic that i am putting myself in singaporean shoes despite the fact that i am not even singaporean, i take it upon myself that i am part of the culture, having spent most of my childhood in this country. i am currently based in both singapore and my country of origin, indonesia, and i see that when indonesians speak bad english, it's mostly due to a lack of aptitude in the language, not due to a laziness in manifesting the correct usage of the language. yet in singapore, as i've previously mentioned, we have been sufficiently educated in the language, since english is the country's first language, and yet, for one reason or another, we choose not to utilise this knowledge that we have. shouldn't we we change this? after all, we wouldn't want to be asked what our first language is whenever we are on tour with people who have no clue where singapore is, would we?
