'Very, very efficient': British YouTuber lists Singlish among 'mighty confusing' English accents

A British YouTuber described Singapore English as "very, very efficient' as it uses as few sounds as possible to get the message across.

Olly Richards used the example that instead of saying "Yes, of course! That shouldn't be a problem in the slightest. In fact, I'd be more than happy to do it," a Singaporean would simply say: "Can."

In a video titled '11 difficult English accents you won't understand' uploaded on July 29, Richards said that Singlish has been a phenomenon since the 1970s with its own unique grammatical structure.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SJ-wTR2H6M&t=398s[/embed]

"The intonation and sentence structure are influenced by various local dialects of Chinese thing," he claimed.

"Kids learnt standard Singapore English at school, but it's completely normal to speak Singlish and the average Singaporean sees it as a real part of their identity. So yes, it's very, very relevant."

"Singaporean" is misspelled as "Singaporian" in one of the subtitles.

The video has more than 300,000 views.

One netizen commented on the video: "I'm from Indonesia, so I'm very familiar with Singlish and its sister, Manglish (Malaysia). Influences don't only come from Chinese dialects (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, etc) but also from Malay and Indian dialects (mainly Tamil).

"But as former British colonies, both Singapore and Malaysia have a high proficiency in English (especially the former) and they have no difficulty adjusting to your English level. It's just that they prefer to speak Singlish and Manglish as they sound more natural and less pretentious."

Other English dialects or accents the YouTuber talked about in the 18-minute video include South African, Jamaican, Guyanese and Liberian.

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This article was first published in Stomp. Permission required for reproduction.