Code-switching in contact varieties like Singaporean English (Singlish) challenges natural language generation due to limited parallel data and rapid lexical evolution. We propose a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that externalizes dialectal knowledge into a curated lexicon, enabling controlled lexical code-switching without fine-tuning. Our approach retrieves candidate Singlish expressions and guides generation through sparse lexical substitution. Human evaluation with 164 Singaporean participants found RAG and zero-shot prompting equally natural and appropriate. Automatic analyses reveal different transformation regimes: zero-shot prompting induces extensive paraphrasing (median 23 token edits), whereas RAG performs minimal substitutions (median 1 edit) with higher semantic preservation (mean cosine similarity 0.978 vs. 0.926). Our results demonstrate that externalizing code-switching into lexical resources enables control and auditability without sacrificing perceived quality, offering practical advantages for rapidly evolving contact varieties.
@article{arxiv.2605.07132,
title = {From Standard English to Singlish: A Retrieval-Augmented Approach for Code-Switched Creole Generation in Large Language Models},
author = {Foong Ming Lai and Yujin Tan and Han Meng and Yi-Chieh Lee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.07132},
year = {2026}
}