| | Come celebrate the diversity of spoken languages in Singapore!
Here starts your journey to INTERSPEECH 2014 in Singapore, paved with a series of 10 newsletters. From the 14th to the 18th September, 2014, our aim, as organizers will be to make you discover the linguistic and cultural specificities that make Singapore the perfect environment to celebrate the diversity of spoken languages.
Welcome to Singapore
Located at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, only 137km north of the equator, our archipelago (64 islands) is sandwiched between Malaysia and Indonesia. As a visitor departing for the “city-state” of Singapore, you'll probably get stunned by the greenery when arriving in Singapore: the “City in a Garden”. Indeed, our tiny island-nation hosts one of the two largest urban primary rainforest in the world and more than ten thousand plant species (compared to 1,500 in UK for example). No wonder that even languages are blooming in this environment!
In 1819, when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles founded what will become the busiest port in the world, the island had around 1,000 inhabitants. A majority of them were Orang Laut (sea gypsies) and some 30 Chinese. Almost two hundred years later, Singapore's population reaches 3.4 million inhabitants including Chinese, Malays, Indians and a variety of other ethnicities, not counting the 2.5 million of foreigners. Rich of this cultural melting-pot, our small island is home for 24 indigenous languages out of which 23 are spoken languages (Leimgruber, 2013). Therefore, Singapore, which is the 190th country by the size, becomes 37th when it comes to language diversity1. Add to this 8 immigrant languages and you will get an idea of what you will hear in Singapore.
Cultural and linguistic diversity
In Singapore's constitution, “Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English” are the “four official languages”. Malay is also defined as the “National language” to acknowledge Malay as “indigenous people of Singapore”. In practice, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil are treated equally as they each correspond to one of the main ethnic group present in the country. English, however, has a special place in the Singaporean society. It is the only official language that is ethnically neutral and, in the Singaporean context, “cultureless” (Alsagoff, 2007). Inherited from the colonial history, English, presents the benefit of not disadvantaging any cultural group and has become lingua franca across the island. No doubt that you will also appreciate the diversity of Singapore through the colorful Singlish (Singapore English) which mixes English, Malay, Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and Tamil.
The diversity of languages spoken in Singapore is not limited to the four official languages. Each of the three major ethnic group counts a number of spoken languages. Chinese Singaporeans, whose origins are predominantly from the south of China, speak Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, Hainanese, Foochow, Henghua, Shanghainese or Hockchia. Malay Singaporeans speak Malay, Javanese or Boyanese while Indian languages in Singapore include Hindi, Panjabi, Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu or Kannada.
Language and culture going together, you will have a lot to see and try while visiting Singapore. A stay in the Lion City is a unique opportunity to catch a glimpse of South-East Asia and you can count on the organizing committee to give you the best of Singapore during INTERSPEECH 2014!
Alsagoff, L. (2007). Singlish: Negotiating culture, capital and identity. In Language, Capital, Culture: Critical studies of language and education in Singapore (pp. 25-46). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Leimgruber, J. R. (2013). The management of multilingualism in a city-state: Language policy in Singapore. In I. G. Peter Siemund, Multilingualism and Language Contact in Urban Areas: Acquisition development, teaching, communication (pp. 229-258). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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