The Leeter Spiaking Singlish Book 3: Loanwords

Following on the success of his 2017 hit, Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate, Gwee Li Sui is back with a series of three “ Leeter” books covering the quintessential features of Singlish, Singapore’ s unofficial language – written in Singlish! In this third volume, we look at where Singlish words come from: “ There are England terms like ‘ act cute’ and ‘ act blur’ whose meanings we tweak, Melayu ones we keep like ‘ cabut’ and ‘ pakat’ , cheena ones we use like ‘ cheong hei’ or translate into England like ‘ wait long-long’ , Tamil words like ‘ goondu’ and ‘ aiyoh’ , distorted Japanese words like ‘ bakero’ , and so on. Then got phrases made with words from different languages that become something lagi tok kong, such as ‘ buay tahan’ and ‘ jiak kentang’ .

Dr Gwee Li Sui is a former academic who now labours in the arts as a poet, writer, editor, literary critic and graphic artist. He wrote Singapore’ s first long-form graphic novel, Myth of the Stone, back in 1993, and has five books of verse to date. He has edited numerous literary anthologies, including Singathology: 50 New Works by Celebrated Singaporean Writers (2015).