Taiwanese migrants in SingaporeTaiwan and Singapore used to be quite similar economically. Now, many talented people from Taiwan are moving to Singapore. What happens when these Taiwanese individuals, who share a lot in terms of language and culture, start living and working in Singapore?
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Wan, Tsung-Lun Alan & Cowie, Claire (2021). Conflicts between World Englishes: Online metalinguistic discourse about Singapore Colloquial English. English World-Wide 42(1): 85–110.
| Wan & Cowie (2021) |
Negative attitudes of non-Singaporeans towards Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) are often used to support the “Speak Good English Movement” in Singapore. This article examines spontaneous metalinguistic discourse about SCE in an online Facebook group where Taiwanese migrants in Singapore gather for mutual support. Based on the idea that metalinguistic discourse is mediated through the social relation between interlocutors, this study reveals how the language ideologies surfacing in the investigated online space are formed through stance-taking processes between people sharing a nationality. We argue that this spatial context elicits and escalates negative ideologies of SCE, which are situated in popular hierarchies of varieties of English, and also hierarchies of Mandarin.
