US Travel YouTuber Slammed for Wrong Information About Singlish & Languages in S’pore

By
Hannah Koh
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Singaporeans have some high standards when it comes to things like food. But another thing that we sure like to look out for is how our country is represented in foreign media.

Remember that time a US teen posted a picture of Marina Bay Sands, saying it was in Tennessee and Singaporeans flocked to the post with a thread of memes?

This time, another US citizen might have just made an error while talking about Singapore and no, he did not receive a meme thread. Instead, Singaporeans were not too happy about his inaccurate comments.

Simple Guide to Singapore

American YouTuber Chris Raney, who hosts the Yellow Productions channel, specialises in travel content.

In 2016, he posted a YouTube video that served as a guide for travelling to Singapore. Despite being a six-year-old video, a clip of it made its way to Facebook on 1 February this year, which you can watch here:

The four-minute guide provided tips for our weather, language, food, and transport. Overall, Raney found Singapore a safe but strict country, with cheap public transport and stellar hawker food.

He also accurately pointed out the humid weather in Singapore and knew where to find the real good food.

Inaccuracies about Singlish & National Language

However, Singaporeans had a bone to pick with him when it came to his description of the languages in Singapore.

“Singapore has four official languages that include English, Mandarin, Malay, and an Indian language. But the official, official language is English. You’ll find everybody here pretty well speaks English.

“The question is, is it an English that you understand? English is Singapore is often referred to as Singlish because they add a lot of Chinese words into their English and add a lot of extra words at the end for emphasis, like ‘Hey, this line at the hawker center’s really busy, lah.’ And the lah is an emphasis type word,” Raney said in this section.

This section alone had readers correcting several things, such as:

  • Tamil is one of the official languages, as opposed to “an Indian language.”
  • Singlish comprises more than just English and Chinese; it is a mix of all official languages
  • The main spoken language may be English, but Malay is the national language.

Here you can see some upset netizens in response to his video:

Image: Screengrab of Facebook
ImageL Screengrab of Facebook

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Other Inaccuracies

On top of his not-so-accurate comments about our languages, Raney also made other errors. The short four-minute clip began with Raney talking about how Singapore was “still cash-based” despite being a “modern city”.

It is important to note that Raney originally shot this video in 2016, so his comments might have been accurate at the time.

However, netizens were quick to point out that over the years, Singapore has developed rapidly, especially due to COVID-19, and cashless payments are ubiquitous now.

Raney also said there were surcharges on taxi fares and that the after-midnight surcharge was 50 cents. In reality, the night surcharge is actually 50 per cent more. Very different numbers indeed.

Amongst the string of angry comments, some netizens were a bit kinder and asked others to not be “so critical”. Others recognised that the video was a reupload and urged Raney to update his video to prevent further backlash.

Yes, we might be concerned about how foreigners talk about us but let’s still maintain a proper image online shall we? Lest the next travel video includes a section on how Singaporeans like to nitpick.

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Featured Image: Screengrab of Facebook (Yellow Productions Travel Guides)

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Hannah Koh
Email: [email protected]