The Word I Couldn’t Translate
The first Singlish word that stopped me cold was “lah.”
I was three weeks into Singapore, standing at a hawker centre in Tiong Bahru, sweat pooling at the small of my back. I’d ordered chicken rice, and when I asked the uncle behind the counter if I could get it without cucumber, he waved a hand and said, “Can lah.”
I stood there for a second too long. Can what? Can lah? It wasn’t a yes I recognized. But it was a yes. I could tell by the way he’d already moved on to the next customer, already scooping rice, already done with me.
I took my plate and sat down, and I remember thinking: I don’t speak this. Not really. I’d learned English as a child. I’d read the guidebooks. And here was a language wearing the same clothes as mine, saying things I couldn’t quite catch.
The Small Word That Held Everything
It took me weeks to understand that “lah” wasn’t a word so much as a feeling attached to the end of a sentence.
“Can lah” meant yes, of course, why are you even asking. “Cannot lah” meant no, and don’t push it. “Okay lah” meant fine, I suppose, said with a small shrug you could hear even over the phone. The word bent to fit whatever mood carried it. Firm, tired, warm, exasperated, “lah” held all of it.
A colleague explained it to me once, over lunch, though explained is generous. She just laughed when I asked and said, “You cannot explain lah. You just feel it.” Which annoyed me at the time. Later I understood she was right.
Then came its cousins. “Leh,” softer, more coaxing, “help me with this leh,” the way you’d ask a favour you weren’t sure you’d earned. “Lor,” which carried a kind of quiet resignation, a shrug of the whole spirit. “Like that lor,” someone would say when things hadn’t gone their way, and there was no arguing with it. It was acceptance, pressed into a single syllable.
I started collecting them without meaning to. Not studying. Just listening.
Learning to Hear
For a long time I only understood the words. I didn’t understand what they were doing.
“Aiyo” arrived early. I heard it the day I spilled kopi down my shirt in the office pantry, and an auntie from accounts clicked her tongue and said it, “aiyo,” half sympathy, half gentle scolding, entirely kind. It’s a sound more than a word, the noise a heart makes when something small goes wrong. I’ve since said it myself, without thinking, when I dropped my keys down a drain. It came out of me like it had always been there.
“Kiasu” took longer to feel. Someone used it to describe the way people queued outside a bakery an hour before it opened, afraid of missing out, literally the fear of losing. I laughed when I first heard it, then caught myself doing it a month later, arriving early to a sale I didn’t need, elbows ready. The word had named a thing in me I hadn’t wanted to look at.
And “shiok.” That one I earned.
The Bowl That Taught Me
It was a wet evening, the rain coming down in the heavy, sudden way it does here, and I ducked into a zi char place under a block of flats to wait it out.
Get C.A. Lorin’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I hadn’t planned to eat. But the man at the next table was having something that steamed and smelled of garlic and the sea, and when the auntie came by I just pointed. She nodded. Didn’t write it down.
What came was a plate of hor fun, the noodles slick and smoky, the gravy dark and clinging, a wok-breath rising off it that I could taste before the first bite. It was too hot. I ate it anyway. The rain kept falling. Somewhere behind me a fan clacked on its stand, pushing the humid air around.
I don’t know why I said it out loud. There was no one to hear me. But the word came, “shiok,” and it was the only one that fit. Not delicious. Not good. Shiok is bigger than that and smaller too. It’s the sound of a thing being exactly right, in exactly the moment you needed it.
The auntie glanced over. She almost smiled.
The Grammar of Belonging
Here is the thing no guidebook told me: you don’t learn Singlish. It learns you.
It slips in through the side door while you’re busy trying to sound proper. One day you’re asking, carefully, “Would it be possible to have this without chilli?” and the next you hear yourself say “no chilli, can?” to a stall uncle who understands you perfectly, faster than you understood yourself.
“Can?” I love that one most now. A whole question folded into a single word. “Can?”, is this possible, are we okay, will you help me. And the answer, always, “can.” No fuss. No ceremony. Just the smallest agreement between two people that yes, this small thing can be done.
I fought it at first. I thought speaking Singlish would mean speaking English badly, that I’d be borrowing something that wasn’t mine to borrow. But that’s not what it is. It’s not broken anything. It’s a language built by a whole island, Malay, Hokkien, Tamil, Cantonese, English, all of it pressed together over generations until it became something that could only exist here, spoken by people who could only be from here.
To speak it, even clumsily, is to be let in a little.
What Stays
I still get it wrong. I put “lah” in the wrong places, land a “leh” that should’ve been a “lor,” reach for “shiok” when a simple nod would do. Locals hear my accent under it and know exactly what I am. That’s fine. I’m not trying to pass.
But something shifted, somewhere in those years of listening. The city stopped sounding foreign. The words that once left me standing dumb at a hawker counter now come to me before I’ve thought to reach for them. When something goes wrong, I say “aiyo.” When something goes right, “shiok.” When someone asks a favour, I hear myself answer, “can, can.”
I think about that first uncle sometimes, the chicken rice, the “can lah” that sent me to my table confused and a little lonely. I didn’t know then that he’d handed me the first word of a language I’d spend years learning. Not from a book. From bowls of noodles and spilled coffee and rain waited out under strangers’ roofs.
You learn the language of a place slowly, and mostly by accident. And one day you notice you’re not translating anymore. You’re just speaking.
It is a little like that first big school leap I wrote about in helping your child move from preschool to Primary One in Singapore; readiness comes less from perfect preparation than from learning the small rhythms of a new world.
Home, it turns out, has a grammar all its own.
You just have to listen long enough to catch it lah.
