I'm going to start this post with a disclaimer: while I took two years of Linguistics in junior college, I am in no way close to be being an expert on English grammar, dialects, and Singlish. Heck, I can hardly even say I'm an expert at speaking English. Take anything I write here with a huge fucking spoonful of salt. Ariana Grande's latest song 'God is a woman' is amazing, sexy, and extremely catchy. However, the one thing that stood out to me immediately when I first listened to it is that she uses the phrase 'my one' in her lyrics. You, you love it how I move you This, for some reason, struck me as being extremely Singlish. If you're not familiar with the term, Singlish is Singapore Colloquial English, an extremely fascinating English variation that at its best, is the cornerstone of Singapore's cultural identity, and at its worst, completely intelligible gibberish to foreigners. If you are familiar with Singlish however, you'd know or notice that the word 'one' is dropped frequently in sentences, seemingly at random. He damn stupid one! Or, my personal favorite that redditor Dreamwaltzer came up with: once you wan to one you wun know where to one one, then you anyhow one also can one. 💎 And this makes perfect sense. Singlish is wonderful and glorious, but that's an appreciation post for another day. While I haven't been in Singapore for a few months, I'm fairly certain I have heard people use 'one' as in 'my own' as in 'mine', and assumed that it was ungrammatical in Standard English (AmE or BrE, since clearly I'm being Eurocentric here), and therefore a unique feature of Singlish. Since I wasn't a fantastic linguistics student (sorry Faizad and Saul), I did my minimal research by reading random internet threads. The common consensus for why 'one' is used in Singlish is that it's a replacement for the Chinese word '的' (de) , which itself is a structural particle and in its different forms (得 and 地) can modify nouns, verbs, adverbs, and do a whole lot of other wizardry. The difference uses of 的 don't necessarily have an equivalent in English, and can be difficult for non-speakers to understand. For the purpose of this post, we'll use three examples: 他的 (his) in Singlish could be 'his one' 他超漂亮的 ( he's very pretty) in Singlish could be 'he damn pretty one' 妳可以的 (you can [do it]) in Singlish could be '[you] can one' It's not difficult to see why 'my one' can be read as an example of Singlish, a la the Chinese '我的' (my/mine). This may be superfluous, but an interesting thing to note is that in English, there is a unique first person possessive pronoun (my/mine) separate from the first person pronoun 'I', whereas in Chinese, the possessive pronoun is created by adding a magical '的' to the first person pronoun '我'. Which leads to the next logical step in determining whether or not Ariana Grande is a user of Singlish: figuring out whether 'my one' is used in Standard English (AmE/BrE for the purpose of this post). I think it's pretty clear that 'his one' or 'can one' are obviously absent and grammatically incorrect in Standard English, but 'my one' is more contentious, as proven in the fact that when I enthusiastically asked my sister if Ariana's song uses Singlish, she looked at me like I was being stupid. Here's mine. After some intensive Googling, it appears that technically, 'my one' used in place of 'mine' isn't actually grammatically incorrect, but is a very, very uncommon usage. There is a common misconception that 'mine' is a contraction of 'my one' - it isn't. Using 'my own' can come off as 'strange' or 'uneducated', but that's not the point. Arguably, since 'my one' isn't technically incorrect in Standard English, it isn't really unique to Singlish, based on the assumption that a lot of unique Singlish phrases/grammatical structures are ungrammatical in Standard English, which is a whole different discussion. In context of the rest of the lyrics in 'God is a woman', I believe that 'my one' is supposed to mean 'mine' or 'my one and only', in which case using 'my one' in place of either of the aforementioned is just... weird. To me, anyway. Conclusion: I can't come to one, but go listen to the song. 🐝 - Just to reiterate: none of the above is meant to be a serious linguistic discussion, since I'm unqualified to do that. This post was just a fun little idea I had to write about, and the subject matter is frankly pedantic and insignificant.
Listen to 'God is a woman' here 💎 More on '的' here 💎 💎 A very legitimate essay on the Singlish particle 'one' here 💎
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