‘Know know married’: playfulness of Manglish in social media platforms

ABSTRACT

Manglish is often associated with negative prestige, such as broken English that arises out of inappropriate direct translations from the Malay language into English. In recent years, however, Manglish has evolved into a range of different functions, particularly in computer-mediated interactions among users of Manglish, and this innovative usage is referred to as ‘modern’ Manglish. The use of modern Manglish expressions shows certain degrees of ‘playfulness’ as a common feature. In this article, we adopt a World Englishes perspective and unpack modern Manglish, comparing it with a number of other named colloquial varieties, particularly Chinglish, Singlish, and Taglish, and we argue that certain usages of Manglish may serve a positive function, so they are worth researching and analysing.

KEYWORDS:

• Manglish
• language variations
• social media
• online platforms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.