Chinese meets Malay meets English: origins of Singaporean English word-final high tone

Abstract

This article investigates the origins of the word-final high tone in Chinese speakers’ Colloquial Singaporean English (CSE). Uniquely among Chinese Englishes, high tone is not attracted to stress, but to word-final position, e.g., hiˈ biscus [LˈMH]. Since this tonal pattern has no convincing match in Singapore’s major Chinese varieties, the author proposes that its ultimate source is indigenous Malay speakers’ phrase-final intonational rise. New recordings provide evidence for transfer via the formerly widespread Malay-based pidgin known as Bazaar Malay, reinforced by the Baba Malay creole of earlier Chinese settlers as well as Indian English. This proposed path of transmission from indigenous Malay > Bazaar Malay > Chinese CSE begs two questions: why did transfer occur from a non-native language, and why did the final high boundary tone become more frequent with each transfer? The author discusses these issues in the light of findings from SLA, third language acquisition, and creole studies, which show that the emergence of this highly marked feature was in fact favoured by a number of known constraints on transfer. Thus CSE tone provides not only a test case for rigorous investigation within a highly multilingual context, but also appears to constitute the first documented case of L2 to L3 prosodic transfer.