TH: In this correspondence, Joshua Ip (from Singapore) asks Felix Chow (from Hong Kong) what Kongish (also known as Konglish) is, and Felix asks Joshua what Singlish is. This piece is an excerpt from State of Play: Poets of East & Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation, edited by Eddie Tay and Jennifer Wong, forthcoming from Out-Spoken Press in October 2023, reprinted with permission of the publisher.

KONGISH

Joshua Ip: What is Kongish?

Felix Chow: The short answer would be the way English is commonly spoken in Hong Kong, a mix of accented English mixed with Cantonese expressions. It’s characterised by its playfulness and its use of purposeful “language errors” to create new meanings. One example would be:

Try my best (English)
搓 my breast (Kongish, literally “rub my breast”)

Another example can be seen in this poem from Louise Leung Fung Yee:

Mom’s blue sky is brew sky,
a borscht brewed blood red:
The distance between daughter and mother

For reference, this is how the term was defined in an academic paper:

Kongish is a blend of English and Cantonese that is characterised by the use of Cantonese words and expressions in romanised form, especially verb phrases such as hai (“is”), ng hai (“is not”) and ng wui (“cannot”); there is a high degree of systematicity in these patterns. English usually predominates, but the Cantonese-ness of Kongish is asserted in multiple ways, including literal translations and unconventional spellings. The latter draw attention to Cantonese influenced pronunciations of English words (e.g. “actually” as actcholly). The words with infixes (sor(9)ly and exac7ly, also written as sor9(r)y and exact7ly) represent so-called “bad language”, and demonstrate how the availability of keyboard characters is exploited to create the forms of Kongish. These forms also creatively exploit the fact that some number terms such as gau (“nine”) have multiple meanings. There is abundant language play, for which Cantonese provides rich resources with its colourful idioms and ever-changing slang (Berg, 2013). In short, Kongish demonstrates various kinds of “bilingual language play and local creativity” (see Luk, 2013).^[1] (Sewell & Chan, 2017, pp. 597–598)

Joshua: Why Kongish and not Honglish or HongKongish or Kongnese or Ganglish / Gonglish?

Felix: I don’t think there was ever one universal name for the language before, but the term Kongish was popularised by a popular Facebook page called “Kongish Daily”. The page, created in 2015, posts regular news commentary in Kongish.

Joshua: Do you have challenges with Kongish not being taken seriously or used solely for entertainment?

Felix: Yes. Perhaps this a relic of the colonial EMI (English as a Medium of Instruction) education system used by top schools in the city, which instilled in students the idea that standard English was the only acceptable form of the language. Studies after the Hong Kong protests in 2014 and 2019 showed that speaking Kongish correlated with a stronger sense of having a “Hong Kong identity”. However, while there has been an increased acceptance of Kongish after these protests, it is still seen as an improper and unofficial version of standard English, which in turn is something that most of the population accept as “good” English and the degree of acceptance of Kongish shown in these studies was still lower than 50 per cent, even among university students.

Joshua: Does Kongish intersect with Cantonese diaspora dictions internationally? Are there different flavours of it? Or is it exclusive only to Hong Kong?

Felix: As far as I know, Kongish is not exclusive to Hong Kong. Cantonese is seen as a strong marker of the Hong Kong identity, and speaking Kongish is a way through which recent first and second generation immigrants can coalesce together. There are a few diasporic comic and meme pages on Instagram (e.g. @ricelumpy) that use Kongish in their works. However, I am not sure what the differences are between HK Kongish and diasporic Kongish.

Joshua: What is the relationship of Kongish with class?

Interestingly, the usage of Kongish seems to be correlated more with age than with class. People of an older generation (50+) rarely speak Kongish, either preferring to speak entirely in standard English or in Cantonese. Perhaps this is because in the colonial era they grew up in, speaking standardised English was seen as a sign of civility and intelligence. The younger generation tends to speak more Kongish, across educational and socioeconomic levels. Not only do university students type and communicate in Kongish, local rappers such as Takeen, Tomfatki and Akiko also use frequent Cantonese-English codeswitching in their songs.

Joshua: Are there loan-words from other languages included in Kongish besides Cantonese and English? Does Mandarin feature in Kongish? Or other Chinese dialects?

Felix: Mandarin and written Chinese are also included in Kongish. While Hong Kong is made up of a hodgepodge of different Chinese subgroups (e.g. Hakka, Hokkien, Shanghainese), the dominant group is Cantonese. Due to the need to achieve communicative efficiency, words from minority languagesordialects are rarely included in Kongish.

Joshua: At which point was “Kongish” created as a term and when did it start to enter the public consciousness as a distinct entity?

Felix: The origin of Kongish can be traced to the so-called “Martian language” used on Internet platforms and forums such as Golden Forum and ICQ in the early 2000s. Before the emergence of user-friendly Chinese input software, many Hong Kong users tended to just type out romanised Cantonese words or used literal Chinese-to-English translation to communicate. For example, instead of semantically translating 你噏乜春 (what the heck are you saying), the phrase is translated phonetically or directly as “You up mud spring”.

The new language gained popularity due to the emergence of these forums. While it was initially seen as a “low language” or as evidence of the declining English standards of Hongkongers, Kongish further entered the public consciousness as a marker of a distinct Hong Kong identity. Kongish was used frequently during the 2014 and 2019 social movements as a way to differentiate protesting Hongkongers from their mainland counterparts.

Joshua: Are there literary works written entirely in Kongish or known for featuring Kongish?

Felix: The most groundbreaking Kongish poem would be Nicholas Wong’s “Golden”, which won Third Prize in the 2020 Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry. The poem, named after the Internet forum HK Golden Forum, is an exploration of the poetics created through Kongish use on local internet forums. Quite a few of Wong’s works make use of Kongish, including “Advice from a Pro-Beijing Lobbyist” and “No/No”.

Other users of Kongish in poetry include Tim Tim Cheng (“Rudimentary Cantonese”, “Salt and Rice”), Antony Huen (“Brain Sea”) and Louise Leung Fung Yee (“First One Fifteen”, “Red Soup”, “Level”).

Joshua: Are there popular media / popular culture phenomena that celebrate Kongish?

Felix: I can’t think of any examples from the mainstream media that celebrate Kongish. The closest to that would be the usage of Kongish in the songs of Serrini, an independent singer who is now one of the leading Cantopop artists, and the bands My Little Airport and GDJYB (雞蛋蒸肉餅), whose songs predominantly feature Kongish. In fact, the lyrics of GDJYB’s songs are written entirely in Kongish!

Joshua: How is Kongish viewed by the government and by the education system?

Felix: While there hasn’t been anything like the “Speak Good English” movement in Singapore, there has never been any implicit endorsement of Kongish by the government or education system. Moreover, markers’ reports from the Hong Kong Examination and Assessment Authority provide guidelines on how teachers can help address Kongish issues in students’ compositions. It can be said that the government sees Kongish as a problem instead of a cultural marker.

SINGLISH

FELIX CHOW: How is Singlish seen in the broader Singaporean community? Is it seen as something to be proud of, or perhaps even a symbol of national identity?

Joshua Ip: There’s an older generation for whom Singlish is reductively seen as just “bad English” and something to be ashamed of. This generation lived through a period where English was a minority language, a means for social mobility via service with the colonial masters or as the language of international commerce, and where the accent of English itself was a definitive status symbol. For kids today, English has long taken on majority language status due to it being the first language of education, and Singlish is common—a way of life. Conversely, the Singaporeans who came of age in the 1980s resisted the official “Speak Good English” movement—the government’s attempt to clean up Singlish with a sanitised standard English—and had to fight tooth and nail for Singlish’s acceptance. Champions like Colin Goh blazed a path through government displeasure and outright censorship with websites like Talkingcock.com and the groundbreaking Coxford Singlish Dictionary, whereas Singaporeans who grew up in the 2000s and beyond can take Singlish more or less for granted due to the efforts of Colin et al. Nineties kids like me are a bridging generation that can remember both the “bad English” days and today’s situation where it’s more accepted.

Felix: I understand that the government and education system have not exactly been supportive of Singlish (given the “Speak Good English” movement). Is this attitude changing or likely to change?

Joshua: The most prominent example of this in recent years is from 2016, when Gwee Li Sui, a local poet and one of my early inspirations, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times trumpeting the awesomeness of Singlish, claiming that “years of state efforts to quash it have only made it flourish”, and that “now even politicians and officials are using it”. One would imagine that a small cultural coup for Singapore, with one of its definitive characteristics taking a bow on an international stage. Instead, the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary felt obliged to smack him down with a petty retort, asserting that “not everyone has a PhD in English Literature like Mr Gwee, who can code-switch effortlessly… and extol the virtues of Singlish in an op-ed written in flawless standard English”. Points for rhetorical jujitsu, but minus points for missing the lesson on the Streisand effect in How-(Not)-To-Press-Secretary 101.

That said, I think over the past few years, the attitude of the government has softened, as wiser minds have come around to the fact that Singapore needs everything it can get to define itself. An immigrant nation with denizens thrown together from cultures with thousands of years of history has to exploit every ground-up narrative available if it wants to be more than a transit hotel, and Singlish is the most ground-up of them all. As such, various government bodies have begun to actively use Singlish in campaigns to feel more relatable, and to better communicate to a public that continues to live and breathe Singlish.

Felix: What is the relationship between Singlish and class? Is it predominantly used by (as Ann Ang puts it) the “Anglophone elite”?

Joshua: That’s an odd quote to come from Ann, a Singlish champion in her own right, and I’d be interested to hear the context of it. Singlish is certainly not exclusively used by the Anglophone elite. There may be some degree of truth to what the Press Secretary asserted to the New York Times—that Anglophones are the ones who can flawlessly code-switch between acrolectal/mesolectal/basilectal Singapore English, with Singlish occupying the basilectal layer, whereas the wider population would only be able to switch between the mesolectal or basilectal.

Instead, a true marker of eliteness would be the inability to speak Singlish at all (or only being able to feign an affected version of it picked up via TV or YouTube) due to being effectively closeted—via an ecosystem of nannies, drivers, delivery apps, tutors, and international schools, then Ivy League universities and internships—from ever coming into contact with anything less than acrolectal Singapore English.

Felix: When was Singlish first used in a literary sense?

Joshua: Singlish has popped in and out of Sing Lit for longer than Singapore has existed as a nation—the instant Raffles landed in 1819 with his ungainly Queen’s English, various people with common sense have been trying to whittle it down into a more efficient language, viz. Singlish pieces like Yin C.H.’s “Small Town Romance” from 1959 liberally employ Singlish for comic effect. There was an early effort by Goh Poh Seng to create a literary language for Malaya by merging English, Malay and Chinese into EngMalChin, but the effort was eventually abandoned. Arthur Yap managed to employ Singlish with dexterity to reflect on social class rather than just for comedy in the 1970s and 1980s, with poems like “2 mothers in a hdb playground”. Then in the 1990s, we begin to see works written fully in Singlish, or some version of it—Ming Cher’s Spider Boys from 1995 was notable for being written entirely in rather eccentric Singlish which retains a certain awkward charm (despite all the Singlish being stripped out of it except dialogue by linguistic ideologues in a modern reprint); in Gwee Li Sui’s Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems, the Singlish tongue never leaves its cheek.

Felix: What are some must-read literary works featuring the use of Singlish (including your own works)?

Joshua: Oh, I’ve named a few! Gwee and Ming Cher, certainly. Ann Ang’s Bang My Car, which inhabits the Singlish register of a Singaporean kopitiam (coffeeshop) uncle with uncanny energy. My own sonnets from the singlish is not exactly in Singlish(!) but is a riff on Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, with the Portuguese/Singlish being the author, not the language. I do have a handful of poems in Singlish, and another bunch more that only scan if you read them in a Singaporean accent. Hamid Roslan’s parsetreeforestfire is the new must-read kid on the block.

Felix: How would you say Singlish came to be?

Joshua: I alluded to it earlier, but English is really a terribly inefficient and inconsistent language. If the world had a Babelesque reset and had to create a new language of business from scratch, it would not look like English. Probably something closer to Malay, or a non-ideogrammatic form of Chinese, with less complicated ways of rendering tense and more consistent rules of spelling. As such, whenever English via its colonial acolytes encounters a population possessed of superior languages, it naturally gets upgraded to a superior form via mapping onto the more efficient sentence structures of the higher languages, and importing loan-words to make up for its numerous inadequacies. The result is usually termed as a creole of some form, but we all know it’s a drastic improvement.

Felix: Kongish and Singlish both feature the usage of code-switching and particles (e.g. la, liao, sia). How are these linguistic elements used in Singlish poetry?

Joshua: I’ve touched on code-switching, so I’ll focus on the particles. Whenever I hear of Victorian times and the secret language of hand fans (or parasols, or gloves or whatnot), I think of the humble “lah”. Sentences consisting of the same words are transformed and elevated by a single end-syllable, imbued with fresh meaning discernible only to those in the know. This smacks both of drastic efficiency as well as the evolution of a high culture that can convey multiple layers of meaning not only through the addition of a syllable but by specific intonations and/or elongations of that syllable. Lah, leh and lor are the grace notes of Singlish, unnoticeable to the unschooled, but secretly conveying the higher social status of the speaker. Oh, was I supposed to talk about poetry?

Felix: One limitation that writers who attempt to write in Kongish have discussed is that Kongish work can easily take on a colloquial and even joking tone. Does Singlish poetry share the same problem? Do you have problems with Singlish not being taken seriously?

Joshua: Yes, there was a time where the invocation of Singlish was purely for comic effect—its abruptness, directness and intimacy drive straight to the hard-to-define core of comedy. In this it excels, but it does become a problem where Singlish cannot be used without eliciting immediate laughter. Arthur Yap conveyed one way out of this problem by using different levels of English/Singlish and code-switching between the two to centre on a class-based commentary. Fully Singlish works like Ann Ang’s and Ming Cher’s still elicit a chuckle every few lines or so, but once the reader is immersed in the lexicon and register, the comic effect dwindles and we are able to read further into the text. Hamid’s parsetreeforestfire takes a radically different approach, tearing apart and iterating various Singlishes to the point of unrecognisability—literally language poetry, centring the use of language and languages within the poem, found to be both familiar and unfamiliar, rather than meaning alone. In that, I think it is the most Singlish book I have ever read, despite large parts of it being unreadable for the average speaker of Singlish. No one can take that book anything less than seriously—though that statement in itself asserts that the unserious is somehow “less” than the serious, something I challenge in my own work.

Felix: Why do you think writers choose to write in Singlish and not in standard English? What are the lyrical or poetic possibilities allowed by Singlish?

Joshua: Why do people choose to speak in Singlish and not in standard English? In my ear, the ghost of the Press Secretary intones: “Most people cannot choose, you know.” Shushing her, I would say that those of us who can, simply wish to exploit the possibilities of every tool available to us—it need not be consciously a political gesture (though there are other ghosts who would rise up at that murmuring “all language is political”.)

As a formalist, I will say that Singlish allows me many options to wriggle into the strictures of my chosen formal straitjackets—the condensation of grammar and tense, the efficiency of particles, and the convenient way a Singlish accent places equal stress on almost every syllable, allowing extreme contortions to match the demands of iambic scansion. And perhaps that is a political statement in and of itself—writing poetry in iambic pentameter, that most English of forms, that only counts as iambic pentameter if you read it as a Singaporean would.

I once had the mentality that Singlish was for Singaporeans, and that I wrote only for them. But the poet Alvin Pang dislodged those thoughts some time ago, when I saw him read a poem called “Candles” at StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, Scotland, before an audience exclusively of middle-aged white people. It was entirely in Singlish; a dialogue between two brothers about stealing candles from the church to study at night. The audience was rolling in laughter throughout the entire poem. I began to realise that I had more in common with this lot than I thought—a community that might not really look on the stiff-upper-lip Westminster accent that fondly, and who recognised the clear signs of a linguistic upgrade when they saw one—I’ve been told Scots is quite an elevated language of its own. Since that reading, I’ve been much more comfortable with reading out poems that feature Singlish to international audiences, and I’ve reaped the same rewards of uncanny recognition time and time again.

Joshua’s Singlish poem

WHAT IS COASTING

landshop is where ppl go to play land, do land party. pah land.

sand? you want to be sand? go sit on the mountain and meditate lor. cannot eat meat must eat vegetable only, wait long long, maybe you can zor sand. eh sands ah. sands is that one like ancestral tablet then go bai bai that one lah. marina see bay sands that one lor.

clam is gong gong or la la sometimes i also not sure. oh claim ah? claim is small claim big claim petty claim that kind. reclaim is after your claim kena reject then you reclaim lor, but then bo bao they maybe still rereject you.

beach can don anyhow call ppl beach can or not. or son of a beach. sekali they beach you next time. next time you play land and you think u like sand but actually ppl think you beach, but clam that you not.

history is the historical that one, when they scream scream very loud like woodbridge liedat. go into historics.

erosion is some sex thing issit?

coast? this one is millenial term lo. is when you close your handphone and u ignore someone when u dowan to date them la. that is called coasting. only beach then do these kind. if you land me your handphone i show you how to b beach. don sand any message. don be historical. just coasting can already. coasting.

Felix’s Kongish Poem

Dear (Representations of) Hong Kong

‘Why is it so hard to tell our own stories?’ — P.K. Leung

Our ancestors thought the five elements could explain everything.
As if life could be grouped into patterns. Okay, I try try.

金        as in golden days
木        as in wooden horse
水        as in flowing water
火        as in fire magic
土        as in scorched earth

Okay, now I talk. 講經 , 港經.
What do we know of Hong Kong?
“Egg tarts, fishballs and ferries.”

Sik dak ga? An urban buffet of clichés.

The first cock-tail bun was made by a man
wanting to save up more money.

“If China is Ah Yeh, shouldn’t Hong Kong be Mum?”
Well we all know what Ah Yeh will say.

“Now that the city has dai ma makeup,
Let’s Meitu those slogans on walls.
The place needs a facelift to make people remember,

‘Hong Kong is Asia’s world city’.”

Some people love the breathtaking photos of open umbrellas
more than those who wielded them as shields.

Flowing water parted waves, so that
fire magic could make scorched earth.
They say 畫面唔靚? Sor9ry wor.

There’s an Apple in Central, a Xiaomi in Mongkok
but the city can’t text us back.
Snapshots of neon shop signs at night—
We fucking love Hong Kong.

The photos, not the city.

What if the city’s trajectory is designed
like a bus route?

My coping mechanism: read the news, share the news,
surrender (to) the news.

When buildings are falling apart, take nice photos
of them—a way to preserve.

Neon signs fade. Streets disappear.
Our children will never walk here.

If pretty visuals could explain everything,
do we try to get used to the view?

^[1] A. Sewell and J. Chan, “Hong Kong English, but not as we know it: Kongish and language in late modernity”, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 27 (3), 2017, pp. 596-607.

How to cite: Chow, Felix and Joshua Ip. “On Kongish and Singlish: A Conversation—Joshua Ip and Felix Chow.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 27 Aug. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/08/27/kongish-singlish.

Felix Chow Yue Ching is an English tutor and a gradudate school dropout. He is the winner of the The HKBU Century Club Citywide English Poetry Competition 2020 and The Maisie Choa English Poetry Prize. His poems are published/forthcoming in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine and Cha. He is also working as a part-time research assistant at MU and is interested in Hong Kong and its representations in Hong Kong English-language writing.

Joshua Ip is a Singaporean poet, editor and literary organiser. He has published six-ish poetry collections, edited eleven anthologies, and co-founded Sing Lit Station, an over-active literary charity. His latest book, translations to the tanglish (Math Paper Press, 2021) gathers contemporary and anachronistic translations of classical Tang/Song Dynasty poetry.joshuaip.com