Before coming to Ireland I was looking at some books about the Irish. I noticed a fella noted that Irish pronounced 'h' as 'haitch' and not 'aitch ' as the english do. As well, the 'tree trees' could mean either the '3 3's' or the '3 trees', along with lazy pronounciations for 'dis' and 'dat' and 'dose'. Which I think goes very well for the way we Singaporeans pronounce 'deese' things as well.
It has since been my personal opinion that as much as we'd like to think that our English is British english, except for the privileged few who actually had an English education, our predecessors probably learnt their english from the Irish (and other) missionaries who came to Singapore. The British were too busy with the administration. Which makes it all a laugh really with all this "speak good english" campaigns, and speaking the "queen's english", which I doubt anyone else other than the Queen and BBC presenters do on a regular basis.
