CHINA-OCCUPIED HONG KONG – The South China Morning Post announced today that it would switch over wholesale its Asian coverage to the hybridized Singlish prevalent in the region as it seeks to achieve greater scale among a growing readership of business executives, financial shapeshifters, fintech zealots and homegrown SCMP journalists largely reared on the vagaries of the dialect and who now comprise a meta-language influencer cabal representing an untapped readership vertical thirsting to break free from any notions of regular English grammar, style, structure, rhythm or sensibility.
SCMP assistant executive at-home editor Zuraidah Ibrahim said the change would take effect immediately, and that some editorial staff would be retrained so that their native English voices and writing would now ring “joyously clear in the staccato bursts of Singlish our readers have grown to cherish and indeed now demand.”
She said the change did not necessarily reflect a diminished value tangential of standardized English still practiced in much of the West, but that it was more in line with the worldwide trend toward regional compartmentalization of borrowed lingua. Singaporean English was chosen, she said, because it has become the common language among Asian professionals who find the Queen’s English unnecessarily burdensome and nativistically opaque.
“The executive board of the SCMP found that for our Asian readers, Singlish you die die must try or they catch no ball at all lah,” Ibrahim said. “They overwhelmingly asked us, ‘Can or not awak?’ And so we decided we can ramly burger to achieve this greater growth target sakali, OK?”
“As with all things leh, change maybe good, ya bung?” she added. “We see this as lobang and then we confirm plus chop. So now no one kancheong spider OK?”
An SCMP editor contacted by Breaking In Asia said that most staffers remained in lockstep with management’s decision, calling it “not really that big a deal” because most of the op-ed writing in the paper had lately become completely incomprehensible anyway and it did not matter one hooch to him if the words came in English, Singlish, Mongolian or Urdu because he would still edit in the time-honored journalistic style of passing the copy on largely unfiltered to the next guy in line so he could get the hell out of there and enjoy a few coldies at the Three Dishes One Soup Boom-Boom Shack in Hong Kong’s Juicy Cewek Couture district.
Be First to Comment