28 Facts About Singapore Mandarin

Singaporean Mandarin is a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken natively in Singapore.

Singaporean Mandarin can be classified into two distinct Mandarin dialects: Standard Singaporean Mandarin and Colloquial Singaporean Mandarin.

Singaporean Mandarin has many unique loanwords from other Chinese dialects as well as Singapore's other official languages of English, Malay and Tamil.

Currently, Singaporean Mandarin continues to develop itself with major influences coming from Standard Chinese, Taiwanese Mandarin and English.

In terms of colloquial spoken Mandarin, Singaporean Mandarin is subjected to influence from the local historical, cultural and social influences of Singapore.

Related searches

Singaporean Mandarin has preserved the vocabulary and certain other features from Classical Chinese and early Vernacular Chinese, dating back from the early 20th century.

Since Singapore's Chinese medium schools adopted Chinese teaching materials from Republic of China in the early 20th century, Singapore's early Mandarin pronunciations was based on the Zhuyin in the Dictionary of National Pronunciation and Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use.

Consequently, Singaporean Mandarin has been influenced by Taiwanese Mandarin to a certain degree.

Use of Singapore Mandarin to serve as a lingua franca amongst the Chinese only began with the founding of Republic of China, which established Singapore Mandarin as the official tongue.

Consequently, Singapore Mandarin began to adopt Hanyu Pinyin and changed its writing system from Traditional Chinese characters to Simplified Chinese characters.

Today's Singaporean Mandarin continues to be influenced from Putonghua, as well as Taiwanese Mandarin and Hong Kong's Cantonese.

Dictionary of Contemporary Singaporean Mandarin Vocabulary edited by Wang Huidi listed 1,560 uniquely local Singaporean Mandarin words, which are not used in Mainland China or Taiwan.

Some local Singaporean Mandarin writings do exhibit certain local Singaporean features.

When speaking of minutes, colloquial Singaporean Mandarin typically uses the word ?, which represents a unit of 5 minutes.

Phonology and tones of Singaporean Mandarin are generally similar to that of Standard Mandarin.

Just like any languages in Singapore, Singaporean Mandarin is subjected to influences from other languages spoken in Singapore.

The natural tendency of Hokkien-speakers to use the Hokkien way to speak Mandarin has influenced to a large degree the colloquial Mandarin spoken in Singapore.

The colloquial Hokkien-style Singaporean Mandarin is commonly heard in Singapore, and can differ from Putonghua in terms of vocabulary, phonology and grammar.

Besides Singaporean Hokkien, Mandarin is subjected to influence coming from other Chinese dialects such as Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese, as well as English and Malay.

In Singapore Mandarin, simplified Chinese characters are the official standard used in all official publications as well as the government-controlled press.

Singapore Mandarin had undergone three successive rounds of character simplification, eventually arriving at the same set of Simplified characters as mainland China.

When many Chinese writers from Southern China arrived in Singapore Mandarin, they established Chinese schools, newspaper press etc.

Up to today, it is still important for politicians in Singapore Mandarin to be able to speak their mother tongue fluently in order to reach out to the multilingual community in Singapore Mandarin.

Some Chinese elites in Singapore had criticized that the Mandarin standard of Chinese Singaporean has dropped greatly due to the closure or subsequent conversion of Chinese-medium schools to English-medium schools in the 1980s.

Ever since 1965 when Singapore Mandarin became independent, bilingual policy has become the pillar of Singapore Mandarin's education.

Related searches

The first language of Singapore was English, while Mandarin was chosen as the "mother tongue" of Chinese Singaporean.

In recent years, with the subsequent economic rise of mainland China and a transition from a world factory to a world market, Singapore Mandarin has become the 2nd most influential language after English.

Besides transmitting Chinese culture values, many people began to realize the economic values of Singapore Mandarin, which has raised the interests of local and working professionals in learning Singapore Mandarin.