To ensure that Singaporeans can communicate to the rest of the world effectively is what the Government has striven to do for decades.

Campaigns, education, and the clamping down on dialects and Singlish are the things we are familiar with.

And yet, Singaporeans continue to be proud to display their ability to converse in Singlish and/or dialect.

There are many essays floating around online trying to explain why this was so - throwing in big terms like "pidgin", "lingua franca", "code-switching", "basilect", etc. The explanations are often complex and a little too academic. Regular Singaporeans end up "catching no ball" after these discourses and only know they love Singlish/dialect, just because.

Enter G Yamazawa.

He is a Japanese American poet and one recent viral video of his can explain our love for Singlish/dialect, even though the subject is about his father's thick Japanese accent.

If I had to break it all down, Yamazawa's point was that communicating, the way we do, is about family, culture, tradition, and the need to communicate with others from a common identity in our own way.

But this breakdown would not do justice to Yamazawa's sublime performance, you just have to watch it:

And check out how he nailed it in his concluding line:

"I'm afraid my rusty Japanese is the broken chain-link that can hold my lineage together. I'm afraid of passing down my lack of language to my children and their Grandpa's accent will sound more foreigner than family. And I'm selfish. Writing poems, and poems, and poems about Japan when my name is the only word I know how to write in Japanese."

Related articles:

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PM Lee’s press secretary rebuts S’porean literary critic’s New York Times article on Singlish

Oxford English Dictionary legitimises 19 Singlish terms by adding them to its lexicon

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