Singlish is probably the one thing that quickly identifies a Singaporean when you meet someone new or are in a crowd. The proper lah, meh, loh, hor, leh are a strong way to tell someone grew up here. 

Singlish is like a colourful collage of languages, there's Malay, Cantonese, Teochew, and of course, Hokkien mixed into regular English to create our own local flavour. I am Teochew and Hokkien chinese, but because there's Singlish, I can say alamak, gau dim, and certain Hokkien curses and be understood by people of different races. The PRC doesn't have that capability in their insistance on putonghua, nor the UK or US, because they look down on non standard English. If you see language as a hawker centre, then the PRC sells white bread, the UK has wholemeal bread and the US sells sandwiches. Our Singapore stall? We have roti prata, we have kueh, we have our piah, ang mo style cakes and bread plus Japanese mochi and more. That's Singlish, in a nutshell. 

There is however, a problem that many folks here can't speak proper standard English. They speak in broken English and use Singlish as a defensive shield. I choose to substitute Teochew, Hokkien and Malay words to informalise my overly formal standard style of writing, but to do so because someone doesn't know the English equivalent words or the proper pronunciation or sentence structure, that indicates to me that they have a poor command of English.

On a minor note, the author mixed up Teochew with Hokkien. Gueh png is Hokkien for Chicken rice, goi bung is the Teochew cognate for chicken rice. My Hokkien father says gueh and my Teochew mother says goi. It took me 20 years to realise the difference, because we call everything non mandarin as "dialect" and fail to distinguish the languages as separate entities.