Singrish Si Bei Shiok lah

I've noticed lately that the topic of conversation at dinner always veers towards the Singaporean language, or Singlish. (occasionally mistakenly referred to as Singhalese) At first I wasn't sure why, but then I realised we were subconsciously overhearing conversations from the tables around us, and amazingly enough, 90% of them were occupied by Singaporeans!!! More than half of them, I couldn't register. I think it's because it's Easter and only international students are left. Nonetheless I am truly amazed by the sheer magnitude of Singaporean students in London.

Anyways, once again I began to think....

A dialect is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. The number of speakers, and the area itself, can be of arbitrary size. It follows that a dialect for a larger area can contain plenty of (sub-)dialects, which in turn can contain dialects of yet smaller areas, etc.

A dialect is a complete system of verbal communication (oral or signed but not necessarily written) with its own vocabulary and/or grammar.
The concept of dialects can be distinguished from:—
sociolects, which are a variety of a language spoken by a certain social class,
standard languages, which are standardized for public performance (e.g. written standard),
jargons, which are characterized by differences in vocabulary (or lexicon according to linguist jargon), and
slang.

Ok I know it's an obvious point and that this has been discussed many times before, but I truly forgot how bad the grammar of an average Singaporean is. I remember struggling in my first year in England to refrain from making a fool of myself by lapsing into erroneous Singlish grammatics (?), only to start tripping on words and sounding like a babbling idiot having a mental debate in multiple languages while trying to juggling two oranges and a hockey ball.
Either ways, I found that the level of ability to express oneself and communicate a point was tremendously different. I'd always found it easy to find the right words to describe my mood, or the situation. E.g. "Wah so chialat", and "I'm feeling damn sianz today". But it became noticeably more difficult for me to express myself to those around my in London.

Ok fair enough, I chose not to use the colloquilisms of my homeland in my new surroundings, but that was mainly for the benefit of the Brits who thought I was a jovial (yet odd) character who would sing after every sentence...(la... ) And I was getting increasingly tired of explaining what I meant when I said, "So How?" [imagine the response sounding similar to Tim Allen's famous grunt from Home Improvement...AaUurRgH???]

But I mean, how hard can it be to communicate in English?

Although it is a dialect of English, Singlish may be difficult to understand for a speaker of another dialect of English, such as British English or American English. The main difficulties in understanding are Singlish's unique slang and syntax, which are more pronounced in informal speech.

To be honest, I miss speaking Singlish. Haha Wikipedia has even dedicated a WHOLE bluhdee section to it. I feel so proud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish

Very nice lidat. Can Lor. I'm happy like bird.