"Pidgin English” ( 洋泾浜英语) exist not only in 上海租界,it also exist in 香港租界,新加坡,马来西亚等英国殖民地‧ When you are pointing your index finger at others, there are your three other fingers pointing at yourself.
Put it this way, Singlish is more than just “Pidgin English”. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish), it is
The vocabulary of Singlish consists of words originating from English, Malay (mainly Bahasa Melayu rather than Indonesian), Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Tamil, Bengali and to a lesser extent various other European, Indic and Sinitic languages, while Singlish syntax resembles southern varieties of Chinese.
I could not agree more with this definition. Nevertheless, many people use Singlish as the fun ways of living instead of for formal business and legal matters. Many Singaporeans and Singlish users, especially those that attend higher education, do realize the grammatical errors. If you think Singlish is the only version of the ‘pollution’ in the local languages, then you ought to find out more about the Chinese used in Singapore, words such as “德士”, “巴刹”, “五脚基”,and etc. However, people continue to use these languages because of the uniqueness and the background of multi-culture society in Singapore. I guess Singaporean Government is hoping for perfectness that will deem to fail.
English is not my mother tongue and I do admit that I frequently made mistakes. Nevertheless, at least I won’t cut and paste the meaning for ‘Low Class’ without realizing it is already self-explanatory. By attacking others, it does not rectify the error you made.
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