The Singlish Edition
On ley, lor, and post-independence languages.
Colin here. If you’ve spent any time in Singapore, you’ve heard it: a rapid-fire patois that sounds like English until it doesn’t, punctuated by syllables that seem to defy grammatical category. Lah. Leh. Lor. Can. A man asks if you want more rice. You say “can.” He nods. Exchange complete!
This delightful linguistic treat is Singlish, and it’s one of the more fascinating language experiments on earth.
It is technically a creole, an English-lexified contact language that emerged from Singapore’s colonial and post-independence mixing of Malay, Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, and Tamil. It came about while the country grew up, in hawker centers and over decades of conversations. A polyglot population developed a shared tongue that belonged to all of them and none of their source cultures individually.
The sentence-final particles are the most alien feature to outside ears. Lah softens or emphasizes depending on tone — “it’s fine, lah” versus “go already, lah!” carries wildly different social temperatures. Leh signals mild surprise or a seeking of confirmation. Lor implies resigned acceptance, something like c’est la vie compressed into a single phoneme. These aren’t filler words, they’re doing real grammatical and emotional work, borrowed from Chinese varieties and fused into something new.
Why is this interesting?
The Singaporean government spent decades trying to kill it! The Speak Good English Movement, launched in 2000 by Lee Kuan Yew’s administration, was an explicit campaign to discourage Singlish in favor of standard English. The reasoning was economic: Singapore needed to compete globally, and a creole was seen as a liability. As a result, schools penalized it, TV broadcasters avoided it, and official policy treated it as a crutch for those who couldn’t manage “proper” English.
Yet Singlish not only survived but became a marker of identity, something that distinguished Singaporeans from Malaysians, from expats, from mainland Chinese, from anyone who hadn’t grown up inside the particular crucible of the city-state. The government’s suppression attempts arguably accelerated its cultural value, the way prohibition makes a drink taste better.
The linguist Lionel Wee has written about Singlish as a site of ideological contestation, a battle ultimately over who gets to define what a Singaporean is. The government wanted a legible, internationally competitive citizenry. The hawker centres and kopitiam tables produced something murkier and more human: a code only insiders could read fluently, carrying decades of migration and improvisation in every lah. (CJN)
I grew up for a stint in Singapore and our family still says things like “Can la.” It’s sticky.
Love this. I feel quite at home in Singapore. Yet, always feel a bit like a poseur when I sprinkle in a little Singlish in hawker centers or local shops. But it’s such a lovely - almost musical - dialect.