Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Introduction ⇫ ¶

Bazaar Malay is spoken mostly by elderly and some middle-aged speakers in Singapore, an island state located at the southern-most tip of the Asian mainland, which is made up of the main island of Singapore, a total land area of 682 square kilometres, and 63 surrounding islets. Four languages have official status in Singapore: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. English is the language of business and administration and is widely spoken and understood. Malay is the national language. Most Singaporeans are bilingual (or multilingual) and speak both their ethnic language (with varying degrees of fluency) and English.

2. Sociohistorical background ⇫ ¶

Bazaar Malay is a Malay-lexified pidgin which was widely used as a lingua franca in the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago before the British East Indian Company took control of Singapore as a trading port in 1819.

The history of Bazaar Malay ultimately goes back to the earliest trading contacts with India and Arabia in the West and China in the East (Baxter 1985: 14; Prentice 1992: 374). The strategic location of the Malay Archipelago, where Malay (with its main regional varieties) is spoken, was geographically and climatically favourable for the establishment of several trade centres such as Malacca on the southwest coast of the Malay Peninsula (before 1511), Cebu, and later Singapore (since 1819), where traders from different regions had to stay for a while to escape the monsoon winds. These trade centres were highly cosmopolitan, being inhabited by people from different regions, such as Chinese, Gujaratis, South Indians, Javanese, and Malay, who shared no common language (Hall 1985: 86). This resulted in the development of a Malay-based trade language, widely used all over the peninsula. This trade language then rapidly spread to ports and coastal areas throughout Southeast Asia. Historical evidence shows that Europeans in the region noted the existence of forms easily identified as Bazaar Malay being used as a lingua franca in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Prentice 1978: 19). This lingua franca Malay was also used as the language of Catholic proselytization on Ambon and Morotai, islands in the Moluccas (see Collins 1998: 26; Later 1548 as quoted in Reid 1993).

Bazaar Malay in Singapore emerged when people speaking different languages attempted to overcome communicative barriers as they carried out business transactions and other communicative activities. Singapore became a cosmopolitan town soon after its opening as a free trade port in 1819; this was due to its strategic location as a new trading post, its free trade policy, and its comparative orderliness. The following groups of immigrants from diverse ethnolinguistic and cultural backgrounds were brought together in Singapore (Freedman 1958: 26):

- Chinese from the southern Chinese coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong

- Indians from southern India, later followed by northern Indians, such as Bengalis and Pathans (or Pashtuns), people from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, etc.

- people from the Dutch East Indies.

Apart from these immigrants, there were Straits-born Chinese coming from the settlements of Penang and Malacca. Most of them were Baba Chinese who speak (or spoke) Baba Malay, which is a Malay-lexified creole and intelligible to native Malay speakers. Baba Chinese were the first group to later shift to English. Given their knowledge of English and Malay, they served as the intermediaries between European firms and local trade centres (Platt & Weber 1980: 3).

All this offered an excellent ground for contact varieties to evolve, and Bazaar Malay thus arose out of this situation. In this multiethnic and multilingual society, Bazaar Malay has served as the lingua franca for interethnic communication. It has also been used for intra-group communication among Indians who speak different languages, while Hokkien has been used among Chinese for the same purpose. Important to note is the role of the Baba Chinese in business that is carried out in this multiethnic community. If we look at the population numbers of Singapore, we observe a numerical dominance of the Chinese ethnic group in Singapore; interestingly, this number has been constant since the 1840s. This can be seen in Table 1 and Table 2, which illustrate the ethnic composition of the Singapore population between 1819 and 1836 and between 1840 and 2000.

In table 2, ethnic Malays refer to locally born Malays and Malay immigrants from Penang, Malacca, Johore, and other coastal areas of modern Malaysia and Indonesia. The Chinese group includes both Chinese from China and Straits-born Chinese¹. The category “Indians” includes Pakistanis. “Others” takes in minority groups such as Eurasians (people of mixed European and Asian ancestry), Arabs, Jews, Ceylonese, etc.

From historical and social accounts of Singapore, languages spoken by immigrants to Singapore are considered input languages in the development of Bazaar Malay, that is, languages spoken by Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, and Europeans. However, Eurasians and Europeans make up a mere fraction of the population of Singapore, and hence the languages spoken by Malay, Chinese, and Indian ethnic groups are considered the possible input languages of Bazaar Malay. The history of Singapore so far suggests that the Chinese ethnic group has been predominant in terms of population and in most sectors of the economy, as trade was largely in the hands of Chinese businessmen and Europeans (Platt & Weber 1980: 3). Hokkien speakers make up the majority of immigrant Chinese in Singapore. They have played an important role in the history of Singapore, and their Chinese variety has been important in the development of Bazaar Malay.

To summarize, (colloquial) Malay is the lexifier of Bazaar Malay, while languages spoken by other groups are substrate languages. Sociolinguistic and socio-historical evidence points to the economic and social dominance of Hokkien speakers in the region and suggests that Hokkien is the major substrate language of Bazaar Malay.

3. Sociolinguistic situation ⇫ ¶

Education policies and language campaigns launched in Singapore have led to a massive language shift that affects all languages, whether used in formal or informal contexts. Malay has lost its status as the lingua franca among different ethnic groups and has been replaced by English. This language shift, at least in informal contexts, has affected the role of Bazaar Malay, although Standard Malay has been maintained among Malays. Bazaar Malay is used in Singapore by the following groups:

- Malays to non-Malays if they do not know standard Malay or English

- non-Malays to either Malays or Baba Chinese if they do not share any other common language

- speakers of diverse linguistic backgrounds who do not share any common language other than Malay (e.g. Indians, Chinese)

- Malays with different dialects when these are not mutually intelligible.

The determining condition here for two interactants’ use of Bazaar Malay is one party’s lack of knowledge of either English or standard Malay or colloquial Malay, even if the other party has that knowledge. This generally applies to the contexts of both Malaysia and Singapore. However, in Singapore, as English has become the lingua franca among the younger Singaporeans, the use of Bazaar Malay is mostly restricted to the older generation and, to some extent, to middle-aged workers who have to use it when dealing with older Singaporeans who do not know English or with workers from Malaysia or Indonesia who do not have a working knowledge of English.

Thus, the status of Bazaar Malay is declining and so is the proficiency or fluency of Bazaar Malay speakers due to the limited contexts in which it is used, less exposure, and lower frequency of language use.

As in other contact varieties, there is variation in Bazaar Malay linguistic features partly due to social factors. Among these factors are the ethnicity of speakers, the relationship between the interlocutors, the age of its speakers, their educational background and manner of acquisition, individual motivation and attitude towards Bazaar Malay, frequency of use, and native speakers’ tolerance of this contact variety.

A brief description of Singapore Bazaar Malay grammar is presented in the following sections. The examples given in these sections are taken from research that I carried out between 2003 and 2004 in Singapore.

4. Phonology ⇫ ¶

Bazaar Malay used in Singapore is not a single unified variety but a range of varieties. Bazaar Malay speakers in Singapore have a “verbal repertoire” of more than one language. They generally have knowledge of their ethnic language and other languages or dialects apart from Bazaar Malay. Bazaar Malay thus varies not only from one ethnic group to another or from one social class to another but also from individual to individual. This variation can be observed significantly at the phonological level. The sound system described here represents a general picture of Bazaar Malay phonology while recognizing the existence of variation due to sociolinguistic variables and their interaction.

Bazaar Malay has twenty-seven segmental phonemes altogether: six vowels (five basic vowels and schwa), two diphthongs (ai and au), and nineteen consonants.

4.1 Vowels ⇫ ¶

Bazaar Malay has the five basic vowels /i, u, e, o, a/ plus schwa /ə/, as shown in Table 3. All basic vowels in Bazaar Malay can occur in all word positions, while schwa /ə/ does not occur in word-final open syllables or in stressed syllables.

Each vowel has two variants differing in length, the occurrence of which depends on the type of syllable in which they are found. As in Malay and Indonesian (cf. Mintz 1994: 4), the long variant occurs in open syllables, whereas in closed syllables, the short variant occurs.

Vowels in Bazaar Malay are nasalized when they follow the nasal consonants /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, and /ɲ/. Nasalization is not phonemic and is only a phonetic phenomenon. This non-phonemic nasalization of vowels continues progressively over such consonants as the glides /w/ and /y/, and affects the vowels following these segments:

mewah [mẽ.wã] ‘prosperous’

naik [nã.ỹẽɁ] ‘ascend’

4.2 Consonants ⇫ ¶

In my data nineteen consonants are identified in Bazaar Malay (cf. Table 4). No voiced stops or palatals occur in word-final position. Stops in Bazaar Malay are normally unaspirated. When occurring in final position, they are unreleased.

In Bazaar Malay every vowel constitutes a nucleus of its own and syllabic consonants do not occur. The most common pattern of syllable structure in Bazaar Malay is (C)V(C) where C stands for a consonant and V stands for a vowel. Consonant clusters do not occur either word-initially or word-finally. The majority of Bazaar Malay words are disyllabic and the most common pattern is CV.CVC.

Each consonant sound in Bazaar Malay can occur as an onset, although most Bazaar Malay speakers do not pronounce the sound /h/ occurring in this position; they also do not pronounce /h/ when it occurs as a coda.

Consonants occurring in a coda are:

- the voiceless stops /p/, /t/, and /k/

- the fricatives /s/ and /h/

- the nasals /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/, but not the palatal nasal

- the liquids /l/ and /r/

Diphthongs occur in word-final position in Bazaar Malay as in pandai ‘clever’ and hijau ‘green’.

Bazaar Malay is a syllable-timed language. In polysyllabic words, the stress is on the penultimate syllable. When the penultimate syllable has schwa /ə/, then the stress shifts to the next syllable.

5. Noun phrase ⇫ ¶

The noun in Bazaar Malay is invariable. Natural gender is distinguished by different words, as in ibu ‘mother’ vs. bapa ‘father’, or lelaki ‘man’ vs. prempuan ‘woman’.

Malay nouns are not marked for number. They can refer to singular or plural, the precise meaning being left to inference from the context. If plurality is to be indicated, it is done by means of reduplication, as in rumah-rumah [house-house] ‘houses’, or with a preceding cardinal number, as in dua orang [two person] ‘two people/men’.

The head of a noun phrase may be a personal pronoun such as kita ‘you’, a demonstrative pronoun such as ini ‘this/these’ or itu ‘that/those’, an indefinite pronoun, or a numeral. Bazaar Malay noun phrases can be extended by various modifying elements which either precede or follow the head. Three different types of modifiers are recognized in Bazaar Malay NPs: (i) the punya construction, (ii) the yang construction, (iii) simply juxtaposed modifiers.

For example, to indicate possession, Bazaar Malay uses different constructions: (1) the possessor (a noun or a pronoun) precedes the head noun with punya as the marker in between, as in saya punya rumah [1sg poss house] ‘my house’; (2) without the marker, as in Anita laki [Anita husband] ‘Anita’s husband’; (3) the possessor simply follows the head, as in rumah saya [house 1SG] ‘my house’.

The most preferred modifier type is the punya construction, which precedes the head in the NP. All the major lexical categories can occur in this construction; cf. gemuk punya orang [fat attr person] ‘fat man’.

Like standard Malay, Bazaar Malay also uses the yang construction, a relative clause where yang is used as a relative marker. The yang construction occurs as a postmodifier of an NP, as in orang yang sudah minum [person rel pfv drink] ‘person who drank (it)’.

The third group of modifiers either precedes or follows the head. Some modifiers in this group have fixed positions, that is, following Standard Malay, prepositional phrases only occur as postmodifiers, as in orang di sini ‘people here’, and numerals only occur as premodifiers, as in tiga anak ‘three children’. Modifiers such as demonstratives, adjectives, and possessor NPs either precede or follow the head as in ini pasar / pasar ini ‘this market’. No pragmatic or semantic difference is observed in the use of these modifiers in different positions (although there may well have been differences when Bazaar Malay was widely used as a lingua franca).

If there is more than one modifier in the NP, the relative order of the modifying elements depends on which modifiers appear in the NP. Adjectives and possessors (if there are any) occur closer to the head than other modifying elements. In my data most Bazaar Malay NPs are made up of a maximum of three components, as can be seen in the following examples, where the head is in boldface. The following three examples, as well as all others in the subsequent sections, are from Khin Khin Aye (2005).

Definiteness is expressed by the use of the demonstrative/article itu ‘that/those; the’, which precedes or follows the head noun (without significant difference in meaning), as in itu orang / orang itu ‘the man’. Indefiniteness is expressed through the numeral satu ‘one’, as in satu orang ‘a man’.

Personal pronouns used in Bazaar Malay are not morphologically marked for case. The same form of pronoun is used for all syntactic functions, and there is no distinction between dependent and independent pronouns (cf. Table 5).

6. Verb complex ⇫ ¶

In Bazaar Malay, the verb complex minimally consists of a head, a single verb, as in (4)-(5).

The verb can be preceded and modified by (1) negators (tidak/tak) with the verb phrase or adjective phrase predicate, and bukan ‘not’ with the noun phrase (and sometimes adjective phrase) predicate and/or (2) TAM (Tense, Aspect, and Modality) markers (see Table 6). If there is more than one modifier within a verb complex, the negator is the first modifier to come, the modal marker is the second to come, and the aspectual marker is the last to come. My data show that no more than three components occur in the Bazaar Malay verb complex. Thus, the internal structure of the verb complex is: negator – modal marker – aspectual marker – verb.

It should be noted that aspectual markers such as baru (or balu as pronounced by my informants), which literally means ‘new’ and can be glossed as ‘recently’, and masih (pronounced mase) ‘still’ occur before the modal markers:

7. Simple sentences ⇫ ¶

Simple sentences in Bazaar Malay show SVO constituent order. Neither the subject nor the direct object is morphologically marked for case.

In terms of the subject and the predicate, all subjects in Bazaar Malay are NPs or clauses, while the predicate may be (i) an NP (ii) an AP (iii) a PP, or (iv) a VP.

Polar interrogative sentences in Bazaar Malay have the same word order as declaratives and occur with or without the question marker ka or ah. As in other languages, when the question marker is absent, a rising final intonation contour plays a role in distinguishing yes-no questions from declaratives.

In content questions, question words mostly occur in situ. These question words may also be fronted, as in English, but without any change in the relative ordering of other constituents.

Passive voice is not marked morphologically in Bazaar Malay. There are three different constructions of passive voice:

(i) The kena construction (NP kena V):

(ii) The dapat construction (NP-Patient dapat V sama NP-Agent):

(iii) The kasi construction (NP-Patient kasi (NP-Agent) V (NP-Patient)):

The causative construction in Bazaar Malay is formed with the verb kasi ‘give’ or beri ‘give’ or bikin ‘make’:

8. Complex sentences ⇫ ¶

In Bazaar Malay there are very few subordinators, and complex sentences are often formed without any apparent subordinator. Below are some examples with such subordinate clauses in boldface:

However, some proficient speakers are found to use complex sentences, and the following is an example of these sentences:

9. Reduplication ⇫ ¶

Reduplication in Bazaar Malay is attested in nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. In all cases, the semantics of the reduplicated words are transparent and may involve:

(i) plurality, diversity, and totality with nouns in the base forms, as in barang-barang ‘things/various kinds of things’

(ii) reduplicated temporal nouns, which may occur as adverbials, e.g. pagi-pagi [morning-morning] ‘early in the morning’

(iii) iterative, durative, and continuative aspect with verbs as the base forms, as in lawan-lawan ‘attacked all the time’, nangis-nangis ‘cried and cried’

(iv) increasing intensity with either adjectives or adverbs as the base forms, as in baik-baik ‘very good’, dulu-dulu ‘long before’.

Triplication of verbs is also observed in Bazaar Malay when the meaning intended is the continuity of the action or the event, as in kasi kasi kasi [give give give] ‘continue giving’.