Serene Ng

Abstract

Loanwords refer to words adopted by speakers of one language from a foreign language. A loanword is also referred to as a borrowing. Borrowing is a consequence of cultural contact between two language communities. It is thus an important sociolinguistics phenomenon and is common in all languages. The aim of this corpus-based study is thus to investigate and provide an account of the English loanwords in Singapore Chinese. The study was carried out based on the "Singapore Chinese Written Corpus" (Ng, 2011) consisting of approximately 5.2-million Chinese character-tokens. Generally speaking, Singapore Chinese (华语huayu) is the common language of Singapore's ethnic Chinese and is also the regional variants of contemporary Chinese Putonghua (Wang, 2002). Though Singapore is a young nation with just over forty years of independency, however the modern history of Singapore can be traced from the 18th century where Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles first founded Singapore. As language develops together with society, hence the development of Singapore Chinese can be traced from the history of Singapore. With a highly cosmopolitan and diverse population which include the majority Chinese and the minorities Malays, Indians, Eurasians, Caucasians and Asians of different origins, Singapore's multi-ethnic and multi-lingual phenomena, coupled with diverse culture characteristics explained the English loanwords found in Singapore Chinese. Findings reveal that English loanwords found in Singapore Chinese mainly take the form of transliteration, translation, as well as a combination of both. Among the various forms, transliteration is a more common means. Investigation found that the English loanwords in Singapore Chinese can be classified into few broad categories, namely transportation, social phenomenon, trend and others. Findings also reveal that from a micro viewpoint, words borrowing occurs in association with changes in Singapore society at different period of time, while from a macro perspective, loanwords found in Singapore Chinese take place in association with changes in the globe.

Keyword(s) :  loanword, Singapore, Chinese, borrowing, corpus