1972 Daily Colonist (Victoria, Brit. Columbia) 22 Mar. 4/3 Spreading in Ceylon was a new patois dubbed Singlish—a blend of poor English with Sinhalese.

1980 Christian Sci. Monitor (Nexis) 15 Jan. 21 I tried vainly to catch..at least one English word in the outpouring of Singhalese ones. There is a common intermix of the two languages referred to as ‘Singlish’, but this time there was nothing to help.

1992 D. Kalupahana Hist. Buddhist Philos. Introd. p. xiv As someone educated in both Sinhala and English, I have been in the habit of writing what is sometimes referred to as ‘Singlish’ (Sinhala idiom rendered into English).

1984 Financial Times 2 Apr. (Surv. Business Travel) p. vii/2 Singaporeans are also Chinese, Malay and Indian... This does not mean that a crash course in Mandarin or Malay is necessary. Anyone..will speak English. Occasionally a certain amount of Singlish will creep in. ‘Can you do it?’ ‘Cannot lah.’

1995 M. Lewis Singapore: Rough Guide 38 It's the unorthodox rhythms of phrasing that make Singlish so memorable. Conventional English syntax is twisted and wrung, and tenses and pronouns cast to one side.

2000 World Lit. Today 74 294 The state retention of an idealized norm based on British English has had the effect of forcing all local variants into the category of Singlish, thus politicizing any choice of idiom by a writer.

1986 N.Y. Times 31 Aug. i. 23/3 No Singlish sentence is immune from the all-purpose ‘lah’.

1997 H. H. Tan Foreign Bodies (1998) i. 7 As usual, it was down to me to deal with the grim grey-uniformed MRT wardens grovelling on Andy's behalf, soothing things over in the Singlish lingo that only the natives could do—‘Ai-ya, sorry about my friend lah. He's ang mo, you know what they're like.’

1999 Maclean's (Electronic ed.) 14 June 54 And in Singapore, censors insisted on changing the title to The Spy Who Shoiked Me. In the local Singlish dialect, the word ‘shoik’ means ‘to speak well of’, explains Myers.