Acquiring the sound system of a contact variety: Singapore English in early childhood

Critical Issues in Linguistics

Jasper Sim, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore

Although Singaporeans often speak English with a recognisably Singaporean accent, long-term language contact and the pervasive influence of individual bilingualism have given rise to considerable variation, both between and within speakers. Consequently, children in Singapore are exposed to—and acquire their languages from—highly variable, multi-accented linguistic input from an early age, a factor that is often overlooked or given less attention in the literature. A central question is whether children acquiring language under these conditions develop comparable underlying linguistic systems, given the diversity of observable language outcomes. In this talk, I discuss variation in the English of early bilingual Singaporean preschoolers to address three interrelated issues: (i) the predictors of individual and group-level variation, (ii) (socially-conditioned) variation in quality of caregiver input, and (iii) whether and how we may disentangle the effects of long-term language contact from those attributable to individual bilingual experience. The aim is to shed light on how complex sociolinguistic environments shape child language phonological acquisition, and to consider whether Singapore English can indeed be regarded as a stabilised contact variety.