Rojak is a common dish in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia consisting of sliced fruits and vegetables served in spicy palm-sugar dressing.


“Siapa nama mu?” translates from Malay literally as “who name you” and means “what is your name?”.


Adapted from a 2010 campaign to improve service sector hospitality in Singapore, words like “betterer”, “betterest” and “bestest” are improvements on the English word “best” that embody an impossible abstraction of being better than the best (Gwee, 2018).

“Mampus” in Malay means “to die, to perish or to be wiped out”. In Singlish, it is commonly used in a comical way to refer to oneself in a conundrum, or also as a curse.

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“Apah sia ini?”, an Indonesian/Malaysian exclamation that translates to “What the [expletive] is this?” was the first thing that came to mind when I stepped into Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Whatever I saw in front of me was horrigible. I was blur like sotong, gabra like zebra, and ultimately, stunned like vegetable. The overwhelming majesty and staggering ineptitude of the visual phantasmagoria assaulting my every sensibility compelled me to learn more about this hulking monstrosity and write about the sociopolitical implications of its construction.

Powderful MssoeI deploy Singlish as a mechanism to argue that a complex mix of disparate elements can be coherent, elegant and pragmatic, unlike the elements of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Singlish, a portmanteau of the words “Singapore” and “English”, is an English-based creole language spoken primarily in Singapore, the entrepôt city-state in Southeast Asia that was once a British colony. The language contains combinations of vocabulary, turns-of-phrase and sentence structure from English, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, and Japanese, among other languages that are spoken by residents in the country. From my empirical understanding and academic research, Singlish is an elaboration of a pidgin language used between non-native English speakers as a means of communication in professional and social settings (Ong, 2017). The thread of pragmatism as well as commerce is as ingrained in the psyche of Singaporeans as it is in Singlish. Various ethnic groups were brought into the country by the British to serve various economic roles and to maintain social division and control (Chua, 2003). While most residents of the country are multilingual, Singlish serves as the de facto lingua franca.

Singlish syntax is consequently optimised for efficiency. For instance, instead of saying, “Why is it like that?”, Singlish speakers boil sentences to their essential elements, conjoin prepositions with adjacent pronouns, and inject emotion to form elegant syntactic structures: “Why liddat?” (Gwee, 2018).

End particles in Singlish are also immensely powerful and convey considerable meaning and emotion with minimal effort. Take the following set of expressions that convey increasing levels of frustration at a tricky situation.

“How leh?” — [curt, inquisitive, pleading] an earnest, curious ask for direction

“How ah?” — [medium, curious, slight annoyance] slightly frustrated plea for help

“How?” — [long, pleading voice] conveys an earnest plea for help in an unfortunate situation

“How sial?!” — [said like an expletive, sometimes with an ironic laugh] conveys intense frustration in a desperate plea to save an irrevocably bad situation

“How can?” — [desperate, said with intensity in each word] “How can this be allowed?”

Unlike Olympic Park, Singlish combines a gamut of influences to form elegant expressions of efficiency and pragmatism. Malu!