icture this: You’re halfway across the world in a crowded cafe. Around you is the predictable bustle of glasses clinking and chairs scraping the floor. People are talking loudly, but the languages and accents are foreign to you.

Then one voice catches your ear.

You may not catch the entire sentence. You hear no Singlish – no “lah” or “shiok”. But there is something in the way the words are spoken and emphasised, how the pitch rises and falls, a recognisable cadence that gives the speech a distinctive melody.

As if picking up a familiar tune, you instinctively know: It’s the Singaporean accent.

An accent is a combination of features, including how we pronounce consonants and vowels, where we place stress, how we intonate and the unique rhythm of our speech, explains Tan Ying Ying, an associate professor of linguistics and multilingual studies at the School of Humanities in Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

While different communities of people in Singapore have slightly different accents, says Tan, there is a fairly standard set of shared features that sounds Singaporean.