Chinese in Singapore

Immerse yourself in Chinese culture, more than 2,000 km away from the People's Republic of China.

With more than 74% of Singaporean being ethnically Chinese, a journey to the tropical island for INTERSPEECH 2014 offers a great opportunity to discover the five-thousand-year of Chinese culture. One can get a glimpse of the vast diversity of Chinese culture from the cuisine, music and languages spoken within 700 km² of Singapore.

Chinese Languages in Singapore

Mandarin Chinese (华语) is one of the four official languages of the Republic of Singapore. It is also commonly spoken in many Singaporean households. Those who are familiar with Chinese languages will soon realize that the cultural mix of Singapore gives birth to a colorful variant of Mandarin Chinese: Colloquial Singaporean Mandarin (新加坡式华语), also known as Singdarin, which coexists with the official Standard Mandarin Chinese. Most of the Chinese Singaporean merrily code switch from one to the other depending of the context.

Spoken Mandarin

Singaporean standard Mandarin Chinese, one the four official languages of Singapore, is almost similar to its continental twin: PRC's Putonghua (普通话). Like other varieties of Chinese, it is an analytic language which follows a subject-verb-object structure. The acoustic unit: the syllable consists of an initial and a final (or sometimes just a final), which is encoded by a lexical tone. Mandarin Chinese consists of  five tones (including a neutral tone) [1,2].

Vocabulary and grammar of the Singaporean standard Mandarin Chinese is almost similar to PRC's official language while the linguistic differs slightly. Singapore Mandarin has also a distinctive accent. For example, the neutral fifth tone of Singapore Mandarin is replaced by a distinctive ru tone due to the influence of Southern Chinese languages such as Hokkien, Teochew or Cantonese [3].

Colloquial Singaporean Mandarin, borrows a number of words from the many languages spoken in Singapore such as English, Hokkien and Malay. For example, basa means market,and originates from “bazzar” in Malay; deshi (德士) originates from taxi in English; kiasu (a characteristic of Singaporean culture that emphasizes one would over-prepare to ensure he succeeds) is adopted from Hokkien, which literally means afraid to lose.

Written Mandarin

The written form of Mandarin Chinese usually uses logograms: the Chinese characters (汉字) or can be transcribed using Latin characters. During the 1950's PRC proposed the simplification of tens of thousands of Chinese characters in order to simplify the writing and increase literacy. Nevertheless, traditional characters are still used in Hong Kong (香港), Macao (澳门) and Taiwan (台湾) and in the over-seas Chinese communities.

Among the various romanization systems, Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音) which is the most common, has been adopted by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1958 and Taiwan in 2008. Other systems include Tongyong pinyin (通用拼音) and Wade-Giles system, both of which have been commonly used in Taiwan.

Until 1969, traditional Chinese Characters were used in Singapore. A Singaporean table of simplified characters, which differed from the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme of the People's Republic of China was then used for seven years until 1976. Some of the characters used during these seven years were unique to Singapore while some others differ from the ones used in People’s Republic of China. In 1976, simplified characters used in PRC were formally adopted in Singapore. Nevertheless, traditional characters are still frequently used in restaurants and shop signs due to historical reasons..

Evolution of Chinese languages spoken in Singapore

Singapore Mandarin has now replaced Hokkien as the lingua franca of the ethnically Chinese community in Singapore [4]. In the past, the majority Southern-Chinese immigration to Singapore made Hokkien the de facto common language (in 1957, 97% of Chinese Singaporean spoke a non-Mandarin Chinese language at home). The replacement of Hokkien by Mandarin was induced by the Government “Speak Mandarin” campaign (讲华语运动) starting in the 1979. Today, Mandarin is spoken in 47% of the Chinese households while other dialects usage dropped at 19%. Nevertheless, a large majority of Chinese Singaporeans speak or understand other Chinese languages, an example of multilingualism in Singapore.

Chinese culture in Singapore

Chinese arts and literature has developed in the context of the Singaporean multi-racial society and presents a rich diversity that especially expanded after the 1960's.  For example, the recent award-winning movie, “Ilo Ilo” (爸妈不在家) directed from Anthony Chen, depicts the story of how a 10-year-old Singaporean boy forms a bond with a foreign domestic helper, who has become an unspoken yet important part of the family.

From a culinary perspective, most Chinese dishes in Singapore are adapted from Southern Chinese cuisine. For example, Hainanese Chicken Rice (海南鸡饭) has now become a Singaporean signature dish.  Local Singaporean delicacies include bak kut the (肉骨茶), pork rib soup with Chinese herbs and spices of Hokkien and Teochew origin; yong tau foo (釀豆腐), a Hakka dish full of a variety of vegetables stuffed with fish and meat paste cooked in a light anchovy-based soup; char kway teow  (炒粿條), thick, flat rice noodles stir-fried in dark soy sauce; hae mee (虾面)yellow egg noodles in a rich broth made from prawn and pork rib stock. Other classic Chinese dishes can also easily be found in Singapore: dim sum (香港点心) from Hong Kong (香港), Peking duck (北京烤鸭) from Beijing (北京) and spicy dishes from Sichuan (四川).

[1] Nancy Chen, Vivaek Shivakumar, Mahesh Harikumar, Bin Ma, & Haizhou, “Large-Scale Characterization of Mandarin Pronunciation Errors Made by Native Speakers of European Languages,” in Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), 2013, 2370-2374

[2] Berlin Chen, Hsin-min Wang, and Lin-shan Lee. 'Retrieval of broadcast news speech in Mandarin Chinese collected in Taiwan using syllable-level statistical characteristics,' in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000

[3] 林华, & 王倩. (2007). “Mandarin rhythm: An acoustic study,” in Journal of Chinese Language and Computing, 17(3), 127-140.

[4] Leimgruber, J. R. (2013). “The management of multilingualism in a city-state: Language policy in Singapore,” in Multilingualism and Language Contact in Urban Areas: Acquisition development, teaching, communication (pp. 229-258). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singaporean_Mandarin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Singaporean_Mandarin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Singaporean_Mandarin#Phonology_differences

http://limpehft.blogspot.sg/2012/04/what-about-singdarin-singaporean.html