Singapore’s economic success in its post-independence years has earned it the moniker of “model nation,” a label that carries exceptional weight for the people within its borders. This dissertation explores the pressures a model reputation has on the language practices of citizen-subjects; in particular, it focuses on the metapragmatic processes that legitimize Singlish as an emblem of authentic pan-Singaporean hybridity. The six chapters together contemplate the various senses of “model”: 1) as exemplar, 2) as formation, and 3) as representation. They argue for approaching Singlish as a language model: as an ideological anchor that both affords and limits its own transformations as a metadiscursive register. Through an in-depth ethnographic analysis of how Singlish speakers are imagined in online Singaporean discourse, the study proposes an alternate framing of Singlish that prioritizes the overhearing and citing practices of a listening subject (Inoue 2006; Reyes 2020) anxious about their place within modern postcolonial Singapore. By prioritizing metasemiotic communicative practices (Gal and Irvine 2019) that determine who can speak Singlish as well as what can be marked as Singlish, the dissertation invokes the notion of indexical hybridity to underscore the fluidity of language boundaries, contributing to a broader theorization of multilingualism and hybrid linguistic practices.