From Hwee Hwee Tan's novel Foreign Bodies

'Okay, this time we give him chance,' the station manager said, 'but next time he do this again, we ou kong him a lot of money.'

It was Andy's first encounter with Singlish, so after we left the control station, he asked me, 'What were you talking about?'

'I told them you were this stupid white foreign country bumpkin,' I said, 'and they said they would let you off this time, but if you litter again, they'll fine you five hundred dollars.' I explained to Andy that though people like me and Eugene could speak perfect English, we reserved our 'proper' English for foreigners, job interviews and English oral exams. With friends and family, we always used Singlish, that is, Singapore slang. Singlish is a type of pidgin English, where English words are arranged according to the rules of Chinese grammar, and sentences are sprinkled with the occasional Chinese, Malay and Indian words. Singlish sounds like 'broken' English--to foreign ears it can sound unintelligible, uneducated, even crude. However, we didn't speak 'broken' English because we lacked the ability to speak the Queen's English; we spoke Singlish, because with all its contortions of grammar and pronunciation, its new and localized vocabulary, Singlish expressed our thoughts in a way that the formal, perfectly enunciated, anal BBC World Service English never could. Besides, who wants to talk like some O level textbook, instead of using our own language, our home language, the language of our souls?

I don't speak either standard English or Singlish consistently. When I'm with friends like Eugene, I enjoy switching between the Queen's English and the Ah Ma's English, randomly, arbitrarily and often in mid-sentence. It's just the Singaporean way, this totally jumbled, multi-lingual lingo--just part of our melting poet, rojak way of speech, thought and life.