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Essay About Singapore's Multilingual Culture

1367 Words6 Pages

Singapore is multilingual society. Excluding tourists, residents of Singapore consists of a vast variety of speakers of different languages. Although the 4 official languages of Singapore are English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, the languages spoken here is not limited to these 4 languages. Singapore still have speakers of Hokkien, Cantonese, which is another variety of Chinese. Other varieties of Indian Languages consist of but not limited to Punjabi and Hindi. There are also speakers of Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and many more. All these languages are classified under the ‘Others’ category.
Due to Singapore’s multilingual culture, I observed 5 different trends of signs taken in a shopping centre at the central of Singapore, Raffles City. …show more content…

English is the most prominent language in all signs.
The prominence of English is due to it being global lingua franca. English is widely known worldwide and definitely in Singapore as well. The reason English is being used in majority of the signs can be explained using the feature pool model. Since English is the common language for all Singapore residents and all parts of the world, it is used the most often. Therefore, English contributes more in the feature pool, and thus the output system will contain more of English. (Signs will use more English)
Since English is widely known around the world, the use of English on signs will catch the attention of the majority of shoppers in Raffles …show more content…

This is done to cater to bilingual crowd in Singapore, and to make it more likely that all shoppers will understand them. The use of these 2 languages is because English is one the official languages in Singapore, and Mandarin, another official language, is the mother tongue (second language) of most Chinese residents in Singapore. Moreover, Chinese residents make up the majority of the population in Singapore (74.2%). Thus, when Mandarin is used in signs, it captures most Singaporeans’ attention as they are able to understand the sign. Also, Mandarin is the most widely used language in the world, with about 1,197,000,000 speakers worldwide, while English has only 335,000,000 speakers, which comes in third place. Therefore, English is usually paired up with Mandarin in

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