I'm sure some of these comments are good-natured fun-poking but given the number of times I've heard expats moaning about how "these people can't speak English!" (and from there it's only one small step to a colonial era-like "these people just aren't like us"), I have to quickly jump in.
Despite what another poster hinted at, even a cursory glance at any linguistics book will tell you that (a) people talk different(ly) everywhere, and I really mean everywhere, and (b) using language to define political identity, usually with the consequence of oppressing one group or another has a long and inglorious history (anybody ever looked up the history of "shibboleth"?). Also language does not *cause* thought, so calm down.
Getting your linguistics right will tell you that it's not bad Mandarin or bad English: just different. British English is different from (than?) American English (let alone say, Black Vernacular English) and neither is bad.
I personally love the fact that we can see a whole new language evolve (Singlish), and searching the archives of LanguageLog throws up this other positive comment by the venerable Victor Mair: [url]http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 03798.html[/url]
And I'm no expert, but Singlish does appear to be grammatical in the sense that it follows precise rules (when you can and can't say issit, oso, oredy, can etc) and is understood to be correct or incorrect by other native speakers.
As for the whole "nothing ain't like it used to be in my day" trope, I'd like to point you to this delightful post by The Economist: "we have been here before" [url]http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/ ... -britain-0[/url]
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