Malay lexical borrowings in Singapore colloquial English

Abstract

Singapore English evolved as a contact variety with English as its
superstrate and the local languages, namely Chinese, Malay and Tamil
as its substrate languages. It is expected, therefore, that Singapore
English would contain features borrowed from these substrate
languages. In this paper, we investigate the processes and types of
lexical borrowing in the colloquial variety of Singapore English
(henceforth SCE) from vernacular Malay. Based on analysis carried
out on a corpus of sixty-four Malay ISCE lexical items, we propose
that equivalence in the grammatical category, economy of use and
social motivations are three key factors that could account for the
integration of Malay words in SCE. In addition, the integration of
Malay words in SCE works in tandem with the more dominant
substrates influence of Chinese languages on the grammar of SCE.