Singapore is placed in the Outer Circle of the Kachru's Three Circles Model, and has over the years developed an English which is uniquely Singaporean. This paper argues that in order to understand the ways in which Singapore English is developing its own standards and ways of speaking, a new model needs to be developed that takes culture, capital and identity into consideration. This sociocultural perspective is one grounded in an understanding of the dualistic role of English in Singapore both as a global language and a local language. It is argued that this duality is consistent with the cultural identity of Singaporeans who negotiate fluidly between two divergent orientations -that of the global citizen and the local Singaporean. The paper explains how a culturally focused model which examines the identities of Singaporean speakers is able to provide a finer-grained and thus more explanatorily adequate account of Singapore English than previously proposed models, in particular, the diglossic analysis.

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In this paper, we demonstrate the specific ways in which the influence of Chinese manifests itself in the structure of the noun phrases containing relative clause modifiers in colloquial Singapore English. We argue that while previous researchers have been correct in pointing out the substratal influence of Chinese, they have not gone far enough in articulating the specific nature of this influence, in particular on the grammar. Colloquial Singapore English relative clauses are interesting because they show an amalgamation of both substrate and superstrate grammatical features. This blending of features is a precise one in which substrate influence is in some way regulated and limited by the superstrate grammar. The combination of superstrate and substrate grammars is illustrated in the constituent ordering of relative clause modifiers, as well as the grammatical behavior of the relative pronoun one. In this paper, we also seek to show that colloquial Singapore English relative clauses are extremely elaborate grammatical structures which argue against new varieties of English being characterized as simplified versions of their superstrate language.

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An experimental design was employed in the investigation of the impact of two status cues, language style and source expertise, on people's perceptions of online political discussants and their intentions and motivations to participate in local online political discussion fora. Specifically, the colloquial form of Singapore English, known as Singlish, was manipulated, together with information about the expertise of a discussant, in a 2 3 2 between-subjects factorial design, with the discussion issue manipulated as a within-subjects variable. Eighty undergraduates, 42 male and 38 female, participated in the study. Overall, the results of this study provide very limited support for the significant effects of status cues on perceptions and participation. The implications of the results of this study for theories of computer-mediated communication and linguistics in the context of the Internet are discussed.