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Singapore English and styling the Ah Beng
Author(s) -
BROWN DAVID WEST,
JIE TEO SHI
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/weng.12070
Subject(s) - stylized fact , negotiation , sociology , identity (music) , variation (astronomy) , class (philosophy) , ethnic group , linguistics , gender studies , social psychology , media studies , psychology , aesthetics , art , anthropology , computer science , social science , philosophy , physics , artificial intelligence , astrophysics , economics , macroeconomics
This paper explores stylized renderings of Singapore English as such ‘verbal art’ is used by Singaporean youth in popular online forums. In order to analyze these stylizations, this study uses corpora collected from two forums frequented by Singaporean students. The data suggests that posters often use stylized representations to perform or to ventriloquize the identity of an Ah Beng (a kind of hustler or gangster). Implicated in such performances are sometimes complex negotiations of class, gender, and ethnicity. The relationship among the linguistic features central to our study and the social meanings signaled by those features suggest the value of approaches that emphasize the range of pragmatic and metapragmatic meanings or indexicalities that accrue to features in modeling variation in Singapore English.