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I’ve been thinking lately about how I grew up very strictly Anglophone in an Asian society, when my parents barely spoke English (not the same way my brother and I do). Like when we speak, we sound like we are speaking different languages (even in English). Depending on where I am, I can sound like the local native English speaker.

Many of my compatriots do not sound like me. There’s Singlish, which is a type of creole combining English, Hokkien, Mandarin, Malay and some Tamil. But that’s not quite it either: there is a ‘basolectal English’, the one that is grammatically ‘correct’ but unmistakeably places the English speaker in the location they come from (Singaporean, Aussie, Kiwi basolectal are very obvious).

It is usually a function of class and society and privilege that a person in a colonial society speaks English a certain way. In my parents’ time, our English teachers and newscasters spoke with a ‘stiff upper lip’. Maybe that was class, then. When I was a teenager, upper middle class people spoke like the BBC newscasters. But not stiff upper lip. Today, we sound.. American or some form of British.

And I don’t know how I started to speak like that. I went to an elite school, but my family barely spoke English. My language at home was not even Mandarin, the language of the upper class Sinophones, it was Teochew and Hokkien; the language of the pasar (the wet market). In formal situations in Singapore, I can code switch into basolectal English, kind of less American sounding formal English, so more older professional people understand me. In the cab, I can curse in Singlish at taxi drivers who ask me if I’m American.

In this video; I sound ‘generic American’, maybe Californian: https://youtu.be/I6m82wB2qhY

When I speak with people from ‘back home’ I sound completely different.