Primer on Manglish

Exploring some notable features of the pidgin that is Manglish.

IN days of old, any intercourse – be it in trade or colonisation – between foreigners and natives inevitably spawned a pidgin, not a bird but a hybrid language, “a simple form of a language, especially English, Portuguese or Dutch, with a limited number of words, that are used together with words from a local language” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 2010).