a) What are the similarities in the types of lexical items in Malaysian colloquial English and Singaporean colloquial English that can be found in the samples of blogs written by Malaysian and Singaporean bloggers?
b) What are the differences in the types of lexical items in Malaysian colloquial English and Singaporean colloquial English that can be found in the samples of blogs written by Malaysian and Singaporean bloggers?
Through the results on the similarities that Manglish and Singlish lexical items share, it is noted that the lexical items mostly belong in Group D; words of English origin/informal as what stated in Ooi’s Concentric Circles of Nativised Englishes (2001) and the rest of the lexical items are included in Group E; words or hybrids of non-English origin/informal. As for the differences, it is found that all the lexical items in Manglish and Singlish from the texts of blogging used in this study, belong to Group E in Ooi’s Concentric Circles of Nativised Englishes (2001). Most of the lexical items which are only found in Singlish particularly in this study are influenced by various Chinese dialects such as Hokkien and Cantonese. On the contrary, Manglish lexical items used by Malaysian bloggers in this present research are mostly influenced by the Malay dialect. This can lead us to one possible conclusion that the main distinction between Manglish and Singlish based on the results in this chapter, is that Manglish
has a stronger influence of Malay dialect compared to Singlish which on the contrary receives greater influence from the Chinese dialects.
Again, based on the findings made in this study, the researcher has also found out that through the categories studied (e.g. nouns, particles and etc.), the categories of adjectives and phrases reveal the highest percentages of differences between Manglish and Singlish lexical items. These two categories are found out to demonstrate quite salient differences in terms of how local dialects have managed to influence Manglish and Singlish lexical items particularly in the lexical item types of adjectives and phrases. Particularly in this study, one could distinguish most Manglish lexical items from Siglish lexical items and vice versa through the usage of adjectives and phrases.
In a nutshell, based on the findings made in this chapter, the researcher has managed to make a comparison between the lexical items of the two colloquial English varieties available in Malaysia and Singapore which are Manglish and Singlish in terms of their similarities and differences. Manglish and Singlish are found to share similarities in all aspects studied in this research which are acronyms, nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, tag questions, particles, phrases exclamations and other unnamed categories. Manglish and Singlish are often regarded as the same as both of them do not show very huge distinctions when they are used interchangeably. The findings made in this chapter have proved that distinctions between these two colloquial varieties of English can still be made particularly in the area of lexical item or vocabularies. Even though the lexical items found in the blogs are not the whole representation for Manglish and Singlish as a much larger is needed for such representation, the researcher believes that the lexical
lexical items in future studies with a much larger corpus in distinguishing Manglish and Singlish lexis. In other words, the numerous lexical items which only occurred once in the data frequency for the result in this study are meant for providing examples in the future research in this similar area of study. The examples and methods used in this study also has shown that the differentiation between Manglish and Singlish lexis is actually possible in linguistics studies.
In this study, the lexical items that were identified to belong in Manglish and Singlish groups are based mainly on Baskaran’s (2005) ME framework and Ooi’s Concentric Circles Model (2001). By referring to Baskaran’s (2005) Substrate Language Referent (use of local lexicon in ME) and Standard English Lexicalisation (English lexemes with Malaysian English usage) and Ooi’s Concentric Circles Model (2001), the researcher has managed to distinguish the lexical items that belong in Manglish and Singlish groups from Malaysian English (ME) and Singaporean English (SE) lexical items. This is because, both frameworks by Baskaran (2004) and Ooi (2001) respectively are able to categorize the standard ME and SE lexical items and also Manglish items that are still considered to be accepted in formal and semi-formal Malaysian contexts because there are no other equivalent words in Standard English. In this study, the researcher regards that the term of Malaysian English is not Manglish and Singaporean English is not equal to Singlish as they both are two very distinct varieties. This is due to the reason that when we talk about ME or SE, it means that we are talking about all the three major sociolects that belong in both ME and also SE which are the acrolect, the mesolect and the basilect. Manglish and Singlish are a part of ME and SE, but categorized in the basilectal group, because in most situations they are considered as ‘broken English’ and normally used by those with limited proficiency
in English.