The sentence-final particle sia in a corpus of Colloquial Singapore English text message data

Abstract

In this talk we investigate the newly emerging sentence-final particle, sia, in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). One of the salient features of CSE is its rich use of sentence-final particles (SFPs). While these particles do not carry grammatical meaning, they serve to add pragmatic nuances to base utterances. By virtue of their colloquial nature, the particles build solidarity among speakers; moreover, they also work as identity markers for CSE speakers. There has been extensive work on different SFPs such as lah, leh, lor, hor, bah. (e.g., Lee 2007; Leimbgruber 2016; Lim 2007; Wee 2002), but a relatively new addition to CSE is still underexplored in research: sia. The origin of SFP sia is said to be the colloquial Malay phrase sial (Khoo, 2012), which is a vulgar term equivalent to common English swear words. In Malay, it can be used as an emphatic marker but is considered extremely rude. This expression has been disseminated into CSE as a SFP relatively recently, and our data shows that it has gained massive popularity among youth today. Analysis of the text messages corpus data of Singaporean college students collected between 2014 and 2015, finds casual use of sia as a SFP to be nearly ubiquitous among Chinese and Indian Singaporeans, though noticeably less common among Malay Singaporeans, especially female. This presentation discusses how the sia particle (1) is becoming generally more prevalent in CSE among young speakers, and (2) seems to have shifted its illocutionary force from being ‘strong’ to ‘weak’ over the last five to six years. These observations indicate that, despite its long association with Malay and other substrate languages, CSE is a dynamic repertoire that continually evolves through young Singaporeans’ moment-by-moment engagement with their language, and the continued influence of these substrates suggest the fluidity of the borders of languages and dialects in this multilingual community.