I guess it might make sense to have #Singlish. Would be great to have chat channel that we can casually chat about more relevant things happening around in our own local dialect that
everyone speaks in on the ground. Singapore is afterall, a multiracial society with various dialects and languages.
Here in Singapore we would usually speak in Singlish or 'Singaporean English'' instead of proper English. Of course, this is not a recognised dialect or language. But it were to be described, it would be something like 'broken english with a mesh of Malay, Hokkien, Tamil, Cantonese, and Teochew'.
Not that we aren't able to speak perfect English, but unless we're speaking to each other about something really serious that needs to be put across clearly or just a foreigner in general and we don't want to embarass ourselves by speaking in what is gibberish to them, we'll then code switch to our actual primary language that is taught in schools, which is none other than English.
Just to make it clear once and for all, English for Singaporeans is not a linking language, it is
the language that we are educated in school and are supposed to speak in but we choose to otherwise in favour of the more casual and tremendously amusing Singlish. In front of foreigners, we merely never show the Singlish speaking side of ourselves.
But you could say that since Singaporeans can speak English, why not everyone just join #english or rather #osu and be happy with a global chat channel?
That'll be because you'll probably catch no ball when we sukasuka juz tok to our local ah bengs and ah lians liddat. #english read liao the mod go wtf is dis shit, dey trying to fuck up wo de channel. Tamade, everything swee swee den got this bunch of jokers come and do funny shit. Den everyone all tio banhammer and kena diamdiam. gg lor. we want tok singlish also cannot den zemoban sia, suck thumb sua.
I know the above paragraph looks like partial gibberish, but believe me when I say that we actually speak like that in front of each other.
If I remember correctly, there was an advance party that was brave enough to try to have a Singlish conversation in #Malaysian. They got shot down with silences.
That said, I really hope #singlish gets passed, it would greatly help unite the Singaporean community as to have a chat platform to freely speak our dialect. We do have 30k active users after all and that might justify for some form of activity in #singlish should it get passed.
tldr: If we actually speak Singlish in any other channel, we'll get silenced for talking gibberish. Singlish is also a local dialect, hence people might feel that this is an underhanded way of getting a chat channel for their own country. On the other hand, we're all
extremely envious that Malaysians have their own channel where they speak Malaysian, so why shouldn't we?
