Tag: multilingualism

CODE SWITCHING!: A phenomenon among bilinguals and its deeper role in identity formation

Leon Kaprielian, Octavio Santana, Sahil Sadiq

In an era marked by globalization and multiculturalism, the phenomenon of code-switching has emerged as a crucial aspect of language dynamics and identity formation among bilinguals. The complexities of code-switching, its popularity, and its deeper ramifications for people navigating many linguistic and cultural domains are explored in this research. We examine how code-switching is used in immigrant communities as a tool for social interaction, identity negotiation, and effective communication through a multidisciplinary lens that takes into account linguistic, cognitive, cultural, and social factors. Based on naturalistic observations and interviews with Farsi, Spanish, and Arabic bilingual speakers, we investigate the complex patterns of code-switching in various age groups and social circumstances. Our research shows that code-switching is a reflection of complex social dynamics, such as social hierarchy, respect for elders, and the maintenance of cultural identity, rather than just a linguistic issue. This study emphasizes how crucial it is to comprehend language practices in a multicultural and globalized world by shedding light on the significance of code-switching in forming people’s identities and social structures.

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Introduction

Code-switching was formerly thought to be a linguistic oddity, but research has since shown that it is a regular aspect of language use. It illustrates the intricate interactions between linguistic, cognitive, cultural, and social elements that influence social interaction and identity formation. Determining the mechanics of bilingualism and multiculturalism, illuminating the complex ways language influences social structures and human interaction requires an understanding of code-switching. 

What is code-switching?!

Code-switching is the fluid transition between two or more languages in a single discourse and is an effective communication and identity-negotiation technique for immigrant communities. Moreover, it is a great way for individuals to build rapport with members who speak the same language.   The informal aspect of this will lead to a higher frequency of code-switching and a willingness to express one’s cultural identity, as opposed to a formal environment.  In terms of the types of code-switching, it comes in three forms, intrasentential, intersentential, and tag switching.

Figure 1: Types of code-switching: intersentential, intra-sentential, and tag-switching

New to code-switching? Here are the methods we used and how you can do it too!

In this post, we’ll discuss methods used for collecting the data that include studying code-switching in a natural environment, and with the authentic use of language by bilingual or multilingual speakers. One of the ways we are going to collect the data is by naturalistic observation. This involves observing naturally occurring conversations in its most pure form, which is essentially the most authentic form of data collection by bilingual and multilingual individuals. To give an extra set of diversity and universality in this regard, there are going to be 3 languages discussed: Farsi, Spanish, and Arabic.

Results

Farsi (Dari)

There is a difference in the amount of code-switching in regards to whether a Gen Z immigrant is speaking with their own age group or with elders.  In Farsi, when one is speaking with elders, it occurs at a much higher frequency and it is more on the “Intersentential” level.  The reasoning is due to 1) Innate understanding that the elders prefer the native language 2) The elders’ proficiency in English is not as advanced.

In regards to when the Gen Z bilinguals speak amongst themselves, there is more English spoken, and during the naturalistic observation, the ratio was 80% English to 20% Farsi.  When the code-switching did occur, unlike with the elders, which (was usually intersentential), it was intrasentential and tag-switching. 

Figure 2: Frequency of code-switching among Farsi speakers (Example: “Bro he’s extremely نابغه (genius) when he explains things. – this is an example of tag-switching)

Lastly, although naturalistic observation was the main method to keep the results as organic as possible, interviews with 2 of the Gen Z members were held to articulate and discuss potential biases and limitations.  One of the members (20 years old) said the code-switching just happened naturally without much thought.  The eldest in the observation (29) said that he does it naturally but also consciously, either due to the fact certain words in Farsi seem articulated better, and also to build rapport with the group culturally, which ties into our main thesis that the phenomenon of code-switching is usually intimately linked to one’s cultural identity.

Spanish

To continue, Spanish and English bilingual speakers tend to gravitate towards an unofficial language, Spanglish. This is when English and Spanish are combined in conversation. Spanglish is a form of code-switching, setting the foundations for forming one’s identity, while simultaneously maintaining their culture.

The method used was a naturalistic observation of a phone call between a bilingual speaker and their parents. They answered the phone in English, just like they do with friends and people of the same age. Spanish was used rarely and the language used had no link to what type of person they were speaking to. The phone then got passed to the speaker’s grandma, and that is when the bilingual speaker started speaking only Spanish. The Spanish the speaker used were easy to decipher that they were speaking to someone of an older age because words like “usted”(you) and “mande”(excuse me) were used. These are formal words and are used when speaking to strangers or elders.

After tallying up the number of formal words used in the phone call, all of them came when speaking Spanish, except one coming from English. The research shows that code-switching can occur within a family and also how a change of language is made to show respect. The same goal could not be achieved with English, since Spanish has an emphasis on formal speaking, causing the speaker to have a complete shift of identity when code-switching.

Figure 2: Frequency of formal words used between Spanish and English from a bilingual speaker

Language is inherently tied to respect when concerning age, class, and gender in Spanish, showing how language can shape the way one thinks.

Arabic

Bilingual Arabic speakers are more likely to use religious jargon (inshallah, mashallah) when interacting with parents and other elders. When speaking to friends, siblings, and cousins they are most likely to speak a 70/30 mix of English and Arabic in contrast to a 20/80 mix when speaking to Elders. Another important consideration is the intonations and accents used for certain words when speaking each language. Because Arabic and English have a very different set of sounds, the same word can be pronounced differently depending on the spoken language. For example, most native speakers of both English and Arabic know that Pepsi – with a p – is the correct pronunciation of the soda, however, they will still pronounce it like Bebsi with a b sound when speaking Arabic. This is done to signal that the speaker is native in Arabic and is part of the Society of native Arabic speakers who do not use the P sound.

Discussion and Conclusions

All three languages investigated truly show just how intricate and complex languages are, especially when it comes to code-switching. Our research shows how code-switching plays an extremely crucial role in forming one’s identity and how it goes beyond just language. It reflects social dynamics like social status, respect for elders, and cultural identity preservation. Our study contributes to the gap of knowledge of understanding how native languages travel down from generation to generation in immigrant families in America, and how code-switching shapes who we are and the social groups we belong to.

References

Albirini, A. (2011). The sociolinguistic functions of codeswitching between Standard Arabic and Dialectal Arabic. Language in society, 40(5), 537-562.

Heller, M. (2020). Code-switching and the politics of language. In The bilingualism reader (pp. 163-176). Routledge.

Kachramanian, C. (2021). Bilingual Interactions: An Investigation into Code-switching and Its Purposes among Armenian-Dutch Bilinguals.

Klavans, J. L. (1985). The syntax of code-switching: Spanish and English. In Proceedings of the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (Vol. 14, pp. 213-231). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Martin-Jones, M. (1995). Code-switching in the classroom: Two decades of research. One speaker, two languages: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on code-switching, 90-111.

Myers‐Scotton, C. (2017). Code‐switching. The handbook of sociolinguistics, 217-237.

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Fluency Ideologies Amongst Undergraduate Bi- and Multilinguals

Kendall Vanderwouw, Rachel Liu, Julia Tran, Nessa Laxamana, Thalia Rothman

UCLA is an incredibly diverse institution, with over 5,000 international students and 100 nations being represented. It is no surprise, then, that they boast a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. From this wealth of information, we sought to explore fluency ideologies amongst bi- and multilingual undergraduates, aged 18 to 22. Through this course and personal experiences, it’s become evident that the definition of fluency is in constant flux. A largely self-defined term, fluency could encompass everything from native-level repertoire to conversational proficiency. Thus, we aimed to investigate whether linguistic background impacted self-perception of fluency.

We engaged in semi-structured interviews with 30 undergraduates to explore this phenomenon and its implications amongst different languages. As we dove deeper, however, we observed little variation in how different languages defined fluency. Rather, most participants revealed similar definitions, centering around, “the ability to express feelings and complex ideas.” Instead, participants expressed a positive relationship between self-perceived fluency and a sense of familial or cultural connection. This finding and others ultimately led us to a new research question that targeted whether an individual’s fluency in a language, upbringing, environment, and cultural background can influence linguistic identity.

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Introduction and Background

Our research began with questions regarding linguistic identity and fluency. Why do definitions of fluency fluctuate? Are definitions of fluency influenced by our linguistic backgrounds? What is the role of fluency in our cultural lives? Our participant pool represented a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds with which to answer these questions. This unique context provided a near-direct perspective into the context of language acquisition since many students had recently left backgrounds of language learning or were still in proximity to them, such as high school and familial environments.

We examined these curiosities through a series of interviews, taking an ethnographic approach to gain a more holistic understanding of the perspectives of our participants. After consolidating interview data, our research focus pivoted in a slightly different direction, one that looked at how a variety of factors—including fluency—can influence one’s linguistic identity. Our central research question was finalized as such:

Does an individual’s fluency in a language, upbringing, environment, and cultural background influence their linguistic identity?

Overall, our project ultimately represented a variety of linguistic backgrounds and cultural identities, with 18 languages spoken by 30 different speakers. This is visually represented in Figure 1, created by one of our group members to illustrate the linguistic diversity of our participants.

Figure 1: Tran, J. (2024). A map illustrating the linguistic and cultural spread of our participants

 To garner a more in-depth understanding of our topic and to examine the current state of research, we engaged with readings regarding fluency ideologies as well as bi- and multi-lingual experiences. Such research provided context that informed our later analyses and conclusions.

For example, we found in several articles (Zubrzycki 2019; King 2013) that self-perceived fluency had the potential to give rise to shame or embarrassment in being unable to match the proficiency of others who may be exhibiting native-level fluency. Such ideologies create the daunting expectation that fluency necessitates a native-level mastery of a language. In addition to these academic sources, we found similar ideologies being proliferated through less formal means, such as YouTube videos. One video from Ted-Ed discussed the benefits of bilingualism to our brains, and in doing so put forth the concept of a “balanced bilingual,” which they describe as an individual who has equal proficiency in their languages. The video puts this idea forth, however, in order to make the point that the majority of bi- and multi-lingual speakers use their languages in different proportions and in varying scenarios. We found that videos such as this help to contribute towards a less stringent narrative of fluency that could lessen the shame caused by self-comparison to native speakers. 

Figure 2; Ted-Ed. (2015). A screenshot from the Ted-Ed video discussing bilingualism and how it may affect an individual’s brain.

This left our group wondering whether such ideologies would be found amongst our participants, and what factors would lead to the formation of the expectation to be natively fluent. Overall, these initial investigations revealed to us that there are certainly links between linguistic identity and fluency self-perception. Our goal through this project was to contribute to this existing pool of knowledge and to provide a voice for our participants to express their unique ideologies.

Methods

Using semi-structured interviews, comprising of 12 standardized questions, we decided to take an ethnographic approach to our data collection. Through this process, we searched for self-perceptions of fluency, past language acquisition environments, as well as any current language ideologies regarding themselves. This methodology was deliberately chosen in order to produce consistent, qualitative data while also providing room for our participants to elaborate upon concepts and topics of their choosing. When permission was granted, we recorded the interviews for the purpose of deeper analysis as well as direct quoting in our project. Our participant pool were undergraduate college students, aged 18 to 22 years old.

Some of the questions that we asked were as follows: “In what circumstances / how often do you use this (these) language(s)?”, “How do you define being “fluent” in a language?”, and “Was it important to your parents/community that you were fluent in this language? What about you?”

Results and Analysis

Our data provided us with different viewpoints and ideologies regarding bilingualism and multilingualism. However, 60% of our participants defined fluency as the ability to express feelings and complex ideas, beyond the introductory phase in the language they speak. Some participants were more descriptive, stating that the ability to speak about specific things, such as the country’s government system, or even cultural idioms or slang. Some were less specific, stating that if you can get by in daily scenarios, you are fluent. 

Figure 3; Laxamana, Nessa. (2024). A graphic showcasing how our participants defined fluency.

We also were able to discover different values that our participants held knowing their other language(s). 77% of our participants stated that they used their language to communicate with their family members, which is why they were able to become fluent in their language. This shows that language serves as a communication between different generations of people, for example between grandkids and grandparents.

Figure 4; Laxamana, Nessa. (2024). A pie chart illustrating when and where our participants use their non-dominant languages.

We interviewed those born in and outside the U.S., and one interviewee stated that being fluent in that language makes them feel more connected to their culture as seen in EX. 1. However, the variation in answers slightly differed between those born in different countries and those born in the U.S. For those born outside the U.S., they stated that their fluency in the language was a way to connect them back home. For those born in the U.S., they stated that fluency in the language was influential in how connected to their culture/mother tongue.

EX. 1

Discussion and Conclusion

At the center of our research was an investigation into the factors that make up and influence linguistic identity. We ultimately align our definition of linguistic identity with a reading from our initial research (Dressler 2014, p. 43), which argues that “linguistic identity can be expressed in terms of expertise (i.e. linguistic competence), affiliation (formal or informal connections), or inheritance (familial connections).” None of these factors were considered to be mutually exclusive in our research. As previously exemplified, the linguistic identities of our participants were commonly observed to be in line with more than one of the pathways mentioned above. Most importantly, our research brought about more understanding of how people’s various reasons for their language fluency are intertwined largely with their understanding of culture and belonging. Language and communication with others are important to keeping cultures and traditions alive, it serves as a sense of cultural connection for most. With our findings, we discovered an insight into how language fluency, ideology, and culture intertwine with one another.

References

Dressler, R. (2015). Exploring Linguistic Identity in Young Multilingual Learners. TESL Canada Journal, 32 (1), 42. https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v32i1.1198

King, K. A. (2013). A Tale of Three Sisters: Language Ideologies, Identities, and Negotiations in a Bilingual, Transnational Family. International Multilingual Research Journal, 7(1), 49–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2013.746800

Ted-Ed. (2015, June 23). The benefits of a bilingual brain – Mia Nacamulli [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMmOLN5zBLY

Zubrzycki, K. (2019). Am I perfect enough to be a true bilingual? Monolingual bias in the lay perception and self-perception of bi- and multilinguals . International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 57(4), 447-495. https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2016-0095

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El tema que hablamos de: Spanish Heritage Speakers and Language Maintenance in the U.S. and France

Ashley Ghodsian, Madeleine Kostant, Maxime Guerra, E Perez

There are various classifications for bilingual speakers in the formal study of bilingualism. Among these are heritage speakers, who have acquired a minority language in the home prior to gaining dominance in their majority language of the society upon being exposed to it in the community and in school. This results in unbalanced bilingualism in detriment to the minority (or heritage) language, a process of grammatical loss or weakening known as attrition. The emphasis of this study is whether this attrition in the heritage language can be attributed to transfer from the majority language, or if it is due to general loss of input or other extralinguistic factors. In order to accomplish this task, this study analyzed a specific syntactic (or sentence structure) construction, prepositional relative clauses, in populations of English-dominant and French-dominant heritage speakers (“HSs”) of Spanish. We hypothesized that previously reported attrition in the grammars of English-dominant Spanish HSs was due to dominant language transfer from English and that French-dominant HSs would not exhibit this same attrition. We conducted both receptive judegment tasks and oral production tasks in order to test this phenomenon, and found evidence that seems to largely be in favor of our hypothesis. We conclude by commenting on the broader implications of our research on bilingualism and pedagogy, especially as it relates to heritage language maintenance.

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Introduction / Background

This study aims to examine heritage speakers’ attrition through the lens of dominant language transfer by probing this question with two groups of HSs: English-dominant Spanish HSs and French-dominant Spanish HSs. To do so, we focus on the syntactic structures of prepositional relative clauses. Relative clauses (“RCs”) are clauses used to modify a noun (e.g., In The dress that Mary wore was very old, the clause that Mary wore is an RC that modifies the noun phrase the dress.).

Prepositional relative clauses, which are notable because they contain a prepositional object, have two possible realizations in a sentence. The first is preposition-stranding (“P-stranding”), which occurs when a preposition is “stranded” at the end of a relative clause (e.g., The track which they train on _ is slippery and dangerous). The second, pied-piping, occurs when the preposition and the wh-element move together to the front of the clause to form a relative clause (e.g., The track on which they train _ is slippery and dangerous). All three languages explored in this study—Spanish, French, and English—accept pied-piping constructions. Our central motivation behind choosing these three languages, however, stems from the fact that English accepts P-stranding, but it is ungrammatical in both Spanish and French. We will return to this cross-language split of grammaticality with P-stranding shortly.

Several previous studies on this topic have inspired our investigation and experimental design. Kim (2007) found that Korean HSs in the U.S. exhibited more attrition of a specific syntactic construction than their counterparts in China. Although this had to do with a different construction than P-stranding, the findings demonstrate language transfer in action, specifically because Korean and Chinese share the same grammatical setting with respect to the construction being tested, whereas English holds a different setting from the other two. This study has been the largest source of motivation for us to investigate dominant language transfer for other types of syntactic constructions.

Further research on P-stranding and Spanish heritage speakers inspired our experiment design, notably Depiante and Thompson (2013) and Pascual y Cabo and Soler (2015). Depiante and Thompson (2013) conducted acceptability judgement tasks with heritage Spanish-English bilinguals, asking their participants to judge pied-piping and P-stranding in various constructions, including relative clauses. They determined that Spanish HSs generally accepted P-stranding more than their Spanish-dominant counterparts. A follow-up study by Pascual y Cabo and Soler (2015) replicated the experiment and further found that the timing of English acquisition also had a notable effect on the rate at which the speakers accepted P-stranding. Both of these studies relied on receptive judgement tasks in which participants read sentences and evaluated their grammatical acceptability. Our study seeks to contribute to this conversation by combining oral production tasks alongside receptive tasks.

The other gap in research that we hope to fill has to do with testing the two different groups of heritage speakers that we are studying, as previously mentioned. Our research question is as follows: is the apparent attrition of Spanish heritage speakers’ grammar (i.e., the acceptance of preposition-stranding) due to a general loss of input or to transfer from the grammar of the dominant language? We are able to investigate this question largely because the three languages we are exploring have the same pattern as the three languages in the Kim study: P-stranding is grammatical in English but ungrammatical in Spanish and French. Therefore, if we find no difference between our English-dominant and French-dominant speakers, we would not be able to attribute any potential attrition to transfer from the dominant language. However, if we find that our English-dominant HSs accept and produce P-stranding at a higher rate than the French-dominant HSs—which is what we hypothesize for this study—we can make the claim that this is due to the fact that English accepts P-stranding and French does not, and therefore that attrition is due to dominant language transfer in the case of prepositional RCs.

Methods

We recruited six participants total; five Spanish-English bilinguals from the U.S., and one Spanish-French bilingual from France. All of the speakers were heritage speakers of Spanish, with ages ranging between 19-23 years old. After recruitment, participants completed our experiment in several stages. First, they completed the production task over Zoom, during which they were shown a presentation with clipart images and accompanying sentences, some of which were test sentences and some of which were fillers. Each test sentence contained a prepositional object, and participants were prompted to rephrase that sentence with a relative clause so that we could see where they placed the preposition. An example of one of these slides is shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Example from the elicitation task in which participants are prompted with the first sentence (left), “The children talk about a classic movie,” and are then required to complete the second one (right), which asks “What is this? This is the classic film…” and results in the response “… about which the children talk” if participants use pied-piping or “…which the children talk about” if they use preposition-stranding.

After the production task, participants completed a “pre-survey” called the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) (https://sites.la.utexas.edu/bilingual/), a tool that linguistics researchers use to determine the language exposure and dominance of bilingual speakers. The BLP contains 19 main questions, each with their own sub-questions, which probe participants’ language exposure, linguistic history, daily use, confidence in fluency, and linguistic identity. All of this data is then used to automatically generate a dominance score, which determines which of the two languages the participant is dominant in. We used the dominance score and our participants’ self-reported ages of exposure in order to ensure that all participants were heritage speakers.

After the BLP, participants completed a main survey (the receptive task) in which they ranked sentences with relative clauses with prepositions, in addition to filler sentences, on a scale of 1 to 5 based on how natural or unnatural they sounded according to their intuitions. Our test conditions were evenly divided between pied-piping and P-stranding sentences. An example of one of our test sentences is shown below in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Example from the receptive task where participants were asked to rate sentences on a scale of 1-5 based on how natural or unnatural they sounded. This sentence is a pied-piping example, and it reads: “The film about which they speak has won many awards.”

Results

We found that for both the elicitation and receptive tasks, the Spanish heritage speakers from the U.S. produced or accepted P-stranding at a higher average rate than the participant from France. It is important to note that we ended up having four (4) Spanish heritage speakers from the U.S. and one (1) from France. Initially, we had five (5) participants from the U.S., but one of them rated the aforementioned “good” (i.e., grammatically correct) control sentences in the acceptability judgment task too low; as such, we disregarded their data.

Figure 3 below presents the production task results. The U.S.-based Spanish heritage participants produced P-stranding constructions 50% of the time, compared to 0% of the time for the French participant. For example, each participant was given the prompt: “Los meseros trabajaban con una cocinera famosa. Esta es la cocinera famosa…” (‘The waiters worked with a famous cook. This is the famous cook…’) and asked to complete the sentence. Two out of four (50%) of the U.S. participants responded with “…que los meseros trabajaban con” (‘…whom the waiters worked with’), stranding the preposition “con” at the end of the phrase. In contrast, the French participant responded “…con que los meseros trabajaban” (‘…with whom the waiters worked’). Given that P-stranding is not grammatical in French or Spanish, these results are in line with our hypothesis, which predicts that the English-Spanish bilinguals would produce more P-stranding than their French-Spanish counterparts due to transfer from English grammar.

Figure 3. Average Production Results Across Speaker Groups: out of all opportunities to produce P-stranding (every relative clause with a preposition), the 4 U.S.-based speakers produced it 50% of the time whereas the participant from France did not produce it at all and produced pied-piping 100% of the time.

Figure 4 below presents the acceptability task results. As explained above, the participants were given a mix of P-stranding, pied piping, and grammatical and ungrammatical filler sentences in Spanish, and asked to rate their grammatical acceptability on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the most acceptable). The U.S.-based Spanish heritage participants rated P-stranding constructions to be an average of 3.33, compared to 1.67 for the French participant. For example, when given the sentence “La serie que hablan de tiene críticas muy buenas” (‘The show which they talked about has really good reviews’), the Spanish-English bilingual speakers gave it an average acceptability rating of 4 compared to 2 for the Spanish-French bilingual speaker. These results align with our hypothesis, which predicts that the Spanish-English bilingual speakers would accept P-stranding more than the Spanish-French bilingual speaker due to transfer from English grammar.

Figure 4. Average Acceptability Ratings Across Speaker Groups: Spanish-English bilinguals judged P-stranding with an average rating of 3.33 out of 5 on an acceptability judgement scale and the Spanish-French bilingual judged P-stranding with an average rating of 1.67 out of 5.

Discussion 

Our data from both the elicitation and acceptability judgement tasks provides evidence in favor of our hypothesis that attrition experienced by Spanish heritage speakers with respect to the production and judgement of prepositional relative clauses is due to grammar transfer from their dominant language. It is important to note that due to our small sample size, these results are just numerical comparisons of averages; we cannot assert statistical significance.

The asymmetry between our speaker groups (four (4) from the U.S. and only one (1) from France) is another significant limitation for this experiment. It was difficult to recruit Spanish heritage speakers from France given that we are based in the U.S. and considering the time constraints on our experiment. For example, one of our U.S.-based participants never produced P-stranding constructions in her elicitation task. If she had been our only participant from the U.S., our results would have shown no attrition in the production task for either speaker group. However, we are attributing this to her dominance score from the Bilingual Language Profile (see “Methods”), because she was the only participant whose score was slightly dominant in Spanish. The other three (3) Spanish-English bilingual speakers were dominant in English, and the Spanish-French bilingual speaker was dominant in French. Our hypothesis allows for these results because it attributes attrition to grammar transfer from one’s dominant language; therefore, a heritage speaker dominant in Spanish may not exhibit attrition to the same degree as one dominant in the majority language of their society.

Another potential limitation could be the fact that our French participant had been learning Spanish formally in school for most of his life, while none of the U.S.-based participants reported taking Spanish for more than a couple of years. Foreign language educator Dr. Kathleen Stein-Smith highlights the discrepancies in second-language education between the U.S. and European countries in her 2013 Ted Talk, “The U.S. foreign language deficit” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CZ7zu5Aeu0). She argues that educational institutions, businesses, and government-funded programs can help to promote foreign-language teaching at the societal level. While our French participant was a heritage speaker of Spanish (and therefore not learning Spanish as a “second” language), the fact that France has such a comparatively robust Spanish language curriculum was unavoidable and may have skewed our results. If a speaker is explicitly taught prescriptive grammatical rules—for example, not to strand prepositions—they are less likely to violate these rules than speakers with no formal education in a language they only acquired in the home.

Conclusion

This experiment allowed us to explore the source of grammatical attrition in Spanish heritage speakers in terms of producing and accepting prepositional relative clauses. We conducted an elicitation task and an acceptability judgement task for five (5) participants: four (4) Spanish heritage speakers from the U.S. and one (1) from France. We found that on average, the participants from the U.S. produced and accepted P-stranding constructions more than the participant from France. Given that English allows P-stranding and French and Spanish do not, these results provide evidence in favour of our hypothesis that grammatical attrition in heritage speakers is caused by transfer from the grammar of speakers’ dominant languages. In other words, our study suggests that the participants from the U.S. are allowing and producing P-stranding in Spanish because they are dominant in English, which allows P-stranding. These findings shed light on how and why heritage speakers experience grammatical attrition, and have pedagogical implications for reinforcing heritage speakers’ language maintenance in the classroom. Bilingual education advocate Aminah Ghanem sheds light on the importance of reforming the U.S. language education system in order to promote multilingualism in her 2019 Ted Talk, “Reforming Our Bilingual Education System” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvCUk9qJQmE). She highlights the positive effects of multilingualism in terms of celebrating diverse cultures, preventing language discrimination, and the marginalisation of heritage speakers. We hope that our study will contribute to this conversation and promote future research and educational policy decisions as they affect heritage bilinguals.

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“I scared he eat, then the stomach explode!”: Missing Tense and the Standardization of Singlish

Hannah Chu, Trevor Htoon, Youchuan (Aaron) Hu, Ann Mayor, Grace Yao

Can we detect language change right as it’s happening? As a result of nearly a century of colonial handoffs, the Southeast Asian Island of Singapore developed its own, unique variety of English: Singapore Colloquial English, more commonly known as Singlish. There is reason to hypothesize, though, that Singlish may be progressively becoming closer to standard English and losing some of its distinctive linguistic features. The following article attempts to identify whether an assimilation to standard English is currently taking place among Singlish speakers, and if so, which categories of speakers are leading the change. The study focuses on one particular feature of Singlish: missing (or “dropped”) tense words, including copular verbs and tense auxiliaries. In order to collect data on this phenomenon, a survey and subsequent transcript analysis of eight YouTube videos from four young Singaporean content creators was conducted to identify tense word dropping rates for various Singlish speakers over time.

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Introduction and Background

Singapore has long been the converging point of various languages and cultures, having spent the better part of 100 years shifting from British to Japanese to Malaysian control before gaining its independence in 1965. With four official languages—English (which serves as a lingua franca and facilitates cross-ethnolinguistic interaction), Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil—it’s no surprise that Singapore eventually developed a unique variety of English that pulls features from the three other languages. Today, Singapore Colloquial English (commonly known as Singlish) has “a distinctive phonology, syntax and lexicon” (Lim, 2004) that were created at the hands of the city-state’s bustling multilingual population. 

One recognizable aspect of Singlish, for instance, is the absence of tense marking in a sentence. Missing tense words are a replication of Mandarin Chinese syntax, in which elements like copular verbs are optional and often dropped (Tan, 2017). The Eton Institute demonstrates how tense is dropped in the sentence She is scared, instead giving She scared in Singlish (5 Unique Features of Singlish, 2021).

The usage of Singlish has not always, however, been without controversy on the Southeast Asian Island. In 2000, the Singaporean government launched the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) “in a bid to delegitimize and eliminate Singlish” (Tan, 2017). The campaign, ongoing as recently as 2019, “often [featured] Singlish as an example of ‘bad English’,” (Tan, 2017) and has started a push for Singlish speakers to adopt standard English speech features. Along with the recent expansion of global platforms like YouTube that expose Singlish speakers to broader audiences of standard English speakers, this raises the question of whether Singlish may actually be in the process of becoming closer to standard English and losing some of its distinctive linguistic features.

The following research focused on missing (or “dropped”) tense words in Singlish syntax, attempting to detect whether this Singlish feature is becoming less frequent in favor of tense word inclusion, which is typical in standard English. Through investigating the speech of millennial and Gen Z (20- to 30-year-old) Singlish speakers of varying registers, the study hoped to identify whether Singlish appears to be assimilating to standard English and which groups of Singaporeans (within what sociolinguistic context and/or from what social category) are at the center of the change.

 Study Design

To collect data on missing tense words—specifically, copular ‘be’ and tense auxiliaries ‘be’, ‘do’, and ‘have’—we conducted an analysis of recorded Singlish speech from the videos of four popular Singaporean YouTube channels: Jianhao Tan, bongqiuqiu, Brenda Tan, and Night Owl Cinematics. Each of the creators falls in the 20’s to 30’s age range, consistent with the hypothesis that any potential language change is happening currently and as a result of recent developments in the past two decades, such as the SGEM.

Image 1: Our subject pool consisted of four popular YouTube channels, run by young Singaporean content creators. Half of the channels were styled as unscripted vlogs, while the other half produced scripted comedy sketch videos.

Two potential motivating factors of language change were considered in the study’s design: speaker agency and recency.

First, we divided our four YouTube channels into two categories that represent two registers of speech, which we called “Scripted” and “Unscripted.” Jianhao Tan and Night Owl Cinematics, who produce comedy content like skits and sketches, fell into the Scripted category. Meanwhile, bongqiuqiu and Brenda Tan, who produce lifestyle and vlog-type content, were chosen for the Unscripted category. By watching videos from channels with opposing content styles, we hoped to compare tense word dropping across differing language contexts.

Additionally, we wanted to capture potential language shifts over time, independent of Scripted and Unscripted categorizations. We chose two videos to analyze from each of the four YouTube channels (for a total of eight videos): one from 2021 (the year of the study) and one from five or more years ago.

For each video, we edited and annotated auto-generated or provided speech transcripts. Relying on our intuition as native speakers of a standard variety of English, we marked each instance of tense word dropping or inclusion on the transcripts. We then reported the number of clauses with tense word droppings as a percentage of the total spoken clauses that would require tense word inclusions in standard English. More tense droppings would indicate a closer association with Singlish features, while fewer would indicate a closer association with standard English.

Image 2: An example spreadsheet of how we collected data for a video. Dropped tense words were added to the transcript in blue parentheses where we deemed them necessary, while pronounced tense words were highlighted in red.

As we began collecting data, we expected to see that our Scripted YouTubers would show lower tense word dropping rates than our Unscripted ones. With the ability to pre-plan dialogue, we thought that they would be more conscious of their language use and exercise larger agency over their speech. We also expected that recent videos from the past year would show lower rates of tense word dropping than older examples, demonstrating an ongoing progression of Singlish adopting standard English features.

Results and Analysis

Out of four YouTube channels and eight videos, we found Night Owl Cinematics—a Scripted channel—to consistently show the highest rates of tense dropping (Figure 1), with over 50% of applicable clauses missing tense words. Brenda Tan—an Unscripted channel—showed the lowest rates, consistently having a less than 4% tense word drop rate.

Figure 1: Table of data on the percentage of dropped tense words per video, as well as raw data on the number of dropped tense words and total applicable clauses.

A closer look at our data revealed unexpected results. For instance, the average tense word dropping rate observed in Scripted videos ended up over three times higher than that in Unscripted videos (Figure 2). In other words, the content creators who we thought would make the most use of speaker agency to hide a Singlish feature like missing tense actually exhibited the feature much more frequently, on average.

Figure 2: Average percentage of tense word droppings in videos by category of register (Scripted vs. Unscripted).

There also seemed to be a slight difference when we compared tense word dropping rates in recent and older videos. Tense word dropping occurred more frequently by roughly 5 percentage points in recent videos, contrary to our hypothesis that the Singlish feature of missing tense would be fading as time went on.

Figure 3: Average percentage of tense word droppings in videos by category of time (older vs. recent videos).

However, we noted that since our data came from a small sample size of just four YouTube channels, it wasn’t immediately obvious whether this increase was particularly significant. We decided to take another qualitative look at our data.

First, we noticed that within the categories of speech register that we chose (Scripted and Unscripted), the percentage of tense word dropping was highly varied. For instance, Night Owl Cinematics and Jianhao Tan both represented our Scripted category; while Night Owl Cinematics’ videos showed missing tense in over half of all applicable clauses, Jianhao Tan essentially did not drop tense words at all (Figure 4). This suggested to us that there was little to no pure correlation between the Scripted factor alone and tense word dropping.

Interestingly, the tense word dropping rates did not vary significantly within a YouTube channel’s own content. The frequency of missing tense did show a relative increase in the more recent videos for three out of the four channels (Figure 4), which was possibly indicative of a more general trend in Singlish. However, the small sample size of our study made it unrealistic to definitively conclude whether time was a significant influencer of tense word dropping rates and whether missing tense is actually becoming more frequent in Singlish as time goes on.

Figure 4: Percentage of tense word droppings for each video analyzed, by YouTube content creator and by category of time (older vs. recent).

These results led us to formulate a few possible explanations for what we observed. For instance, tense word dropping rates may be more closely correlated overall with the language background you came from (perhaps where in Singapore you grew up or in which language or ethnic community) or personal linguistic style. This would explain why each individual speaker’s missing tense rates were relatively consistent all in all, while comparing two different speakers (even across the same Scripted or Unscripted category) showed larger variation. These seem to be more plausible factors than year or speaker agency, as we originally thought.

We also noted, for example, that Night Owl Cinematics specifically brands themselves as a “Singaporean humour” channel—their content specifically hopes to showcase Singaporean culture and life. This might explain why, though they have strong agency over and can pre-plan dialogue, Night Owl Cinematics showed prominent tense word dropping: they have a motivated interest in sharing the unique characteristics of Singaporean language use.

Discussion, Conclusion, and Expansion

Ultimately, there is not enough evidence in our data to claim that Singlish is becoming closer to standard English and adopting its features. In fact, many of our results appeared to suggest otherwise.

There are a few points in our research that, if modified, could lead to more conclusive descriptions of the current landscape of Singlish’s evolution. It should be kept in mind, for instance, that we surveyed a limited subject pool of four content creators and a small sample size of two videos for each creator. We also looked only at online personalities with large audiences not just from Singapore, but elsewhere around the globe. This may, consequently, have resulted in the Hawthorne effect, where speakers alter their usual speech when under the conscious observation of an audience.

Further research into this topic could be focused on looking at potential influences of Singlish on Singaporeans who are attempting to learn or speak a more standard variety of English, such as Singaporean international students or Singaporean nationals living and working in the United States. Additionally, investigating the speech of local Singaporeans rather than just that of online and public figures would provide a more holistic picture of how Singlish is adopting (or not adopting) standard English features. Surveying a larger sample size of videos that span a more extended time scale would give better insight on Singlish languages changes over time. Studying other features, beyond missing tense or even beyond syntax, could also provide a more well-rounded idea of how Singlish is shifting over time.

Finally, although our findings did not line up with our hypothesis, we were able to make other interesting observations based on the data collected.

It appears, first of all, that our speakers showed a clear awareness of the difference between standard and Singlish English features at times. For instance, take the following Night Owl Cinematics video from 2021, “Types of Online Shoppers”. While the written subtitle reads, “How many do you want?” (Image 3), the speaker actually pronounces the following utterance: “How many you want?” This seems to show a conscious acknowledgement of what is typical in standard English syntax, in striking juxtaposition to what was natural to the Singlish speaker.

Image 3: A screenshot from Night Owl Cinematics’ 2021 video, “Types of Online Shoppers”.

Moreover, we were able to confirm from our data that tense word dropping appears to be not random but systematic and motivated (part of Singlish grammar; not randomly distributed) in Singlish, as Lim (2004) had suggested was the case with phonological, syntactical, and lexical features of the variety. We can review a few examples (Image 4), which show two systematic instances of tense word dropping. We firstly see that the feature of missing tense seems to appear in conjunction with the Singlish particle ‘one’; in both a Night Owl Cinematics and a bongqiuqiu video, the speakers use the particle at the end of the clause and drop that same clause’s earlier copular verb. In a similar phenomenon, the missing of the tense auxiliary ‘are’ appears in conjunction multiple times with the auxiliary ‘gonna’, where the utterance of the latter seems to trigger the dropping of the tense auxiliary immediately before it.

Image 4: Evidence for systematic tense word dropping in Singlish, taken from three analyzed videos. Posited tense dropping “triggers” are marked in green; dropped tense words are marked in red parentheses.

So, is Singlish becoming more and more like standard English? It’s hard to say. What seems to hold is that Singlish has unique and systematic features, of which the distribution varies among its diverse speakers. The tangible influence that campaigns like the Speak Good English Movement have on non-standard varieties and their assimilation to standard forms of a language remains to be seen.

 

References

5 Unique Features of Singlish. Eton Institute. (2021, May 24). Retrieved October 15, 2021, from https://www.etoninstitute.com/wp/2021/05/24/5-unique-features-singlish/.

Gopinathan, S. (1979). Singapore’s Language Policies: Strategies for a Plural Society. Southeast Asian Affairs, 280-295.

Leimgruber, J. R. E. (2013). Singapore english: Structure, variation and usage. Cambridge University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27908382.

Lim, L. (Ed.). (2004). Singapore English: A grammatical description (Vol. G33). John Benjamins.

Tan, Y. (2017). Singlish: An Illegitimate Conception in Singapore’s Language Policies? European Journal of Language Policy 9(1), 85-104. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/657324.

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