First, I would like to thank Dr. Wong for his insightful and supportive review of my book. At the same time, I am grateful to the editor for being given an opportunity to clarify a few minor points of disagreement.
There are two points in the review in which statements from my book are slightly misrepresented. I do not believe or claim that phase 2, “exonormative stabilization,” is the most interesting one in the emergence of Postcolonial Englishes. This is clearly phase 3, “nativization,” and I explicitly say so. The phrase quoted in the review stands in the section on phase 2, but at the end of this section, pointing forward to the following one: I explicitly say this is the “kick-off” of the most interesting process of “structural nativization” (39), in phase 3. Furthermore, undue weight is given to the claim of “universality” of my model being applicable “whenever a language is transplanted,” by quoting this phrase twice in the review, and only the first time with its necessary qualifier “it appears”: I do consider the possibility of parallel cases in the diffusion of Latin, Romance or Slavic languages (68–70), but I would be hesitant to overgeneralize this claim, and I state that “wider applicability [would be] a matter of speculation” (68). There may be parallels to other cases of languages being transplanted, but there will also be differences; this issue needs further empirical investigation.
In a few more cases my line of thinking seems to have been misunderstood. I fully agree (and I say so on 156–58) that the distinctive form of present-day Singaporean English emerged amongst Singaporeans and not in direct contact with British people, mainly in the mid to late 20th century and not earlier, and as a consequence of the government's bilingual language policy (if only indirectly). Even when the vast majority of British settlers left, the language, and contact with it, no doubt remained (as a native language of the Eurasians and the working language of policy makers, for instance) and was transmitted continuously. Also, I agree that cultural convergence is worth looking at in greater detail; I do not focus on it but I mention it (47, 88–89) and certainly would not exclude it.
What we will not be able to resolve here, I suspect, is the issue of attitudes towards “Singlish” and, correspondingly, its legitimacy and its possible future. As every Singaporean knows, as I do say explicitly in the book (158, 160), and as I had a chance to witness again at many debates at the Regional Language Conference in Singapore in April 2008, this is a highly controversial and hotly contested issue: The government firmly resists and decidedly condemns this dialect and its use, while there is also no doubt and plenty of evidence (some of which I quote) that many (and of course not all!) Singaporeans cherish and defend it and view it as a marker of a local identity. This represents a classic case of a conflict between overt and covert prestige. Wong chooses to adopt and defend the government's prescriptive position, while I hold that this is only half the reality, ignoring the enormous covert prestige that Singlish undisputedly enjoys. And unlike Wong, I am convinced that in the long run covert prestige, being closer to people's real attitudes and hearts, is likely to be more powerful.
