Chinglish

so today on the escalator up at Raffles Place MRT, i hear these two ladies chattering behind me: "镇么这个 timing 会遇到你?" (sic, i can't open the box to choose words! irony.) Which set me thinking about Chinglish, the latest pet population peeve of the government: the language that so many singaporeans speak, the interweaving of chinese and english. Of course this would be a good thing if not for the fact that the interwoven language is not made up of language wholes, but language holes. (Yes i can say that with a straight face).

Often the jumping between languages is simply a matter of convenience, because a certain idea comes to mind more readily in one language than the other. For me (and perhaps some other people out there) it's largely simply because i lack the vocab in chinese to express something. i.e. 我 don't know how to speak 华语. So some people go around with an inability to converse properly when forced to use just one of the two languages, and instead of becoming really bilingual it's more like bi-semi-lingual.

Anyway, long story short, this chinglish made me think of spanglish, and how this phenomenon is not unique to singapore, of course, and it seems that it might arise wherever a critical mass of people speak the same multiple languages. And it might not be a bad thing. Different languages with their different cultural origins view the world differently and sometimes have much more appropriate descriptive terminology. Which is where word borrowing comes from, like how "deja vu" expresses a concept hard to describe succintly in English.

Whorf, this linguistic guy, believes that language influences the way you view the world, and in the extreme your perception might be restricted by the bounds of your language: you will find it extremely hard to conceptualise things you cannot put into words.

So, if what he thinks is true, then being bilingual is good because you can see and express things better than someone who only speaks one of the two languages. Being fluent in a hybrid language is better, because you theoretically retain the increased perception ability that comes with both languages, assuming you learnt both languages to a sufficiently advanced level. But meaning and perception in languages is also stored in the grammatical structure, and simply borrowing isolated words just doesn't work as effectively, and neither will a mishmash hybrid. But perhaps it's a step towards it. Maybe at some point in the future, we'll have just one unified language. At the rate we're going, it's probably going to be heavily chinese influenced too, damnit. (Think Firefly)

Aside: After i started thinking about this, i noticed a whole bunch of other occurences throughout the day like "makan bee hoon" (to eat thin rice noodles (which i don't really like)). Intriguing.