Does Singlish Contribute to Singaporean's National Identity
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Singapore, July 2006
Library of Congress – Federal Research Division Country Profile: Singapore, July 2006 COUNTRY PROFILE: SINGAPORE July 2006 COUNTRY Formal Name: Republic of Singapore (English-language name). Also, in other official languages: Republik Singapura (Malay), Xinjiapo Gongheguo― 新加坡共和国 (Chinese), and Cingkappãr Kudiyarasu (Tamil) சி க யரச. Short Form: Singapore. Click to Enlarge Image Term for Citizen(s): Singaporean(s). Capital: Singapore. Major Cities: Singapore is a city-state. The city of Singapore is located on the south-central coast of the island of Singapore, but urbanization has taken over most of the territory of the island. Date of Independence: August 31, 1963, from Britain; August 9, 1965, from the Federation of Malaysia. National Public Holidays: New Year’s Day (January 1); Lunar New Year (movable date in January or February); Hari Raya Haji (Feast of the Sacrifice, movable date in February); Good Friday (movable date in March or April); Labour Day (May 1); Vesak Day (June 2); National Day or Independence Day (August 9); Deepavali (movable date in November); Hari Raya Puasa (end of Ramadan, movable date according to the Islamic lunar calendar); and Christmas (December 25). Flag: Two equal horizontal bands of red (top) and white; a vertical white crescent (closed portion toward the hoist side), partially enclosing five white-point stars arranged in a circle, positioned near the hoist side of the red band. The red band symbolizes universal brotherhood and the equality of men; the white band, purity and virtue. The crescent moon represents Click to Enlarge Image a young nation on the rise, while the five stars stand for the ideals of democracy, peace, progress, justice, and equality. -
Transfer Learning for Singlish Universal Dependencies Parsing and POS Tagging
From Genesis to Creole language: Transfer Learning for Singlish Universal Dependencies Parsing and POS Tagging HONGMIN WANG, University of California Santa Barbara, USA JIE YANG, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore YUE ZHANG, West Lake University, Institute for Advanced Study, China Singlish can be interesting to the computational linguistics community both linguistically as a major low- resource creole based on English, and computationally for information extraction and sentiment analysis of regional social media. In our conference paper, Wang et al. [2017], we investigated part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing for Singlish by constructing a treebank under the Universal Dependencies scheme, and successfully used neural stacking models to integrate English syntactic knowledge for boosting Singlish POS tagging and dependency parsing, achieving the state-of-the-art accuracies of 89.50% and 84.47% for Singlish POS tagging and dependency respectively. In this work, we substantially extend Wang et al. [2017] by enlarging the Singlish treebank to more than triple the size and with much more diversity in topics, as well as further exploring neural multi-task models for integrating English syntactic knowledge. Results show that the enlarged treebank has achieved significant relative error reduction of 45.8% and 15.5% on the base model, 27% and 10% on the neural multi-task model, and 21% and 15% on the neural stacking model for POS tagging and dependency parsing respectively. Moreover, the state-of-the-art Singlish POS tagging and dependency parsing accuracies have been improved to 91.16% and 85.57% respectively. We make our treebanks and models available for further research. -
Singapore 2020 International Religious Freedom Report
SINGAPORE 2020 INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM REPORT Executive Summary The constitution, laws, and policies provide for religious freedom, subject to restrictions relating to public order, public health, and morality. The government continued to ban Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (Unification Church). It restricted speech or actions it perceived as detrimental to “religious harmony.” The government held 12 Jehovah’s Witnesses in the armed forces’ detention facility for refusing on religious grounds to complete mandatory national service. In December, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) detained a 16-year-old Christian male for planning to attack two mosques using a machete on the anniversary of the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shootings. According to the ministry, the individual had been self- radicalized through online material, including the Christchurch attacker’s manifesto and ISIS videos of violence against Christians. The government stated the individual acted alone and did not try to influence or involve others in his attack plans. In February, the MHA launched an investigation into a local, unregistered chapter of the South Korean Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony (Shincheonji Church), which resulted in the deportation of five South Koreans and the dissolution of affiliated organizations. In November, authorities arrested 21 individuals for resuming activities of the church “covertly.” In June, police detained a permanent resident for posting comments to Instagram about wanting to kill Muslims. In September, police issued a warning to Workers’ Party Member of Parliament Raeesah Khan for social media posts she made in 2018 and May 2020, before she was a candidate for parliament, accusing the government of discrimination against religious and racial minorities. -
Policy Brief 14-17: Alternatives to Currency Manipulation: What Switzerland, Singapore, and Hong Kong Can Do
Policy Brief NUMBER PB14-17 JUNE 2014 experienced trade defi cits that were larger than they otherwise Alternatives to Currency would have been. Even in periods of full employment such as the mid-2000s, currency manipulation caused a misalloca- Manipulation: What tion of capital; in particular, it enabled unsustainable housing booms in many countries. Fred Bergsten and Joseph Gagnon (2012) identifi ed 22 Switzerland, Singapore, countries as currency manipulators over the 2001–11 period. Governments of these countries maintained trade (current and Hong Kong Can Do account) surpluses by holding down the values of their currencies through excessive purchases of foreign assets. Table Joseph E. Gagnon 1 updates some of the data Bergsten and Gagnon analyzed for these countries through December 2013. Th e table shows that many of them still buy large quantities of offi cial foreign Joseph E. Gagnon is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the author of Flexible Exchange Rates assets, suggesting that the issue of currency manipulation is for a Stable World Economy (2011) and Th e Global Outlook for not going away. For the subset of the 22 countries for which Government Debt over the Next 25 Years: Implications for the historical data are available, fi gure 1 shows that net purchases Economy and Public Policy (2011). of offi cial foreign assets have declined a bit from their previous peak, but they remain much higher than before 2003.2 Author’s Note: Th anks to Kent Troutman for expert research assistance and A recent paper (Gagnon 2013) shows that net offi cial to Fred Bergsten, Jacob Kirkegaard, Marcus Noland, Adam Posen, Kent Troutman, Edwin Truman, Angel Ubide, and Steve Weisman for helpful fi nancial fl ows (which are dominated by offi cial purchases comments. -
Vowel and Consonant Lessening: a Study of Articulating Reductions
Title: Vowel and Consonant Lessening: A Study of Articulating Reductions and Their Relations to Genders Author name(s): Grace Hui Chin Lin & Paul Shih Chieh Chien General Education Center, China Medical University (Lin) English Department, Changhwa University of Education General Education Center, Taipei Medical University (Chien) Academic Writing Education Center, National Taiwan University Page Number: p. 70-81 Publication date: 2011, Dec. 20 Conference information for conference papers (name, date and location of the conference) : Name : International Conference on Computer Assisted Language Learning in 2011, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology Date: Nov. 5, 2011, Location: Yunlin, Taiwan 69 Vowel and Consonant Lessening: A Study of Articulating Reductions and Their Relations to Genders Grace Hui Chin Lin Paul Shih Chieh Chien ABSTRACT Using English as a global communicating tool makes Taiwanese people have to speak in English in diverse international situations. However, consonants and vowels in English are not all effortless for them to articulate. This phonological reduction study explores concepts about phonological (articulating system) approximation. From Taiwanese folks’ perspectives, it analyzes phonological type, rate, and their associations with 2 genders. This quantitative research discovers Taiwanese people’s vocalization problems and their facilitating solutions by articulating lessening. In other words, this study explains how English emerging as a global language can be adapted and fluently articulated by Taiwanese. It was conducted at National Changhwa University of Education from 2010 fall to 2011 spring, investigating Taiwanese university students’ phonological lessening systems. It reveals how they face the phonetics challenges during interactions and give speeches by ways of phonological lessening. Taiwanese folks’ lessening patterns belong to simplified pronouncing methods, being evolved through Mandarin, Hakka, and Holo phonetic patterns. -
'Speaking Singlish' Comic Strips
International Journal of Innovation, Creativity and Change. www.ijicc.net Volume 12, Issue 12, 2020 The Use of Colloquial Singaporean English in ‘Speaking Singlish’ Comic Strips: A Syntactic Analysis Delianaa*, Felicia Oscarb, a,bEnglish department, Faculty of Cultural Studies, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Email: a*[email protected] This study explores the sentence structure of Colloquial Singaporean English (CSE) and how it differs from Standard English (SE). A descriptive qualitative method is employed as the research design. The data source is the dialogue of five comic strips which are purposively chosen from Speaking Singlish comic strips. Data is in the form of sentences totalling 34 declaratives, 20 wh- interrogatives, 14 yes -no interrogatives, 3 imperatives and 1 exclamative. The results present the sentence structure of CSE found in the data generally constructed by one subject, one predicate, and occasionally one discourse element. The subject is a noun phrase while the predicate varies amongst noun, adjective, adverb, and verb phrases– particularly in copula deletion. On the other hand, there are several differences between the sentence structure of CSE and SE in the data including the use of copula, topic sentence, discourse elements, adverbs, unmarked plural noun and past tense. Key words: Colloquial Singaporean English (CSE), Speaking Singlish, sentence structure. Introduction Standard English (SE) is a variety of the English language. This view is perhaps more acceptable in the case of Non-Standard English (NSE). The classification of SE being a dialect goes against the lay understanding that a dialect is a subset of a language, usually with a geographical restriction regarding its distribution (Kerswill, 2006). -
The Prime Minister's Speech at the State Banquet In
1 THE PRIME MINISTER'S SPEECH AT THE STATE BANQUET IN CELEBRATION OF NATIONAL DAY AND THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDING OF MODERN SINGAPORE, HELD AT SINGAPORE CONFERENCE HALL ON 8TH, AUGUST, 1969 --------- Your Royal Highness, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is not often that we celebrate such an anniversary, nor one with such distinguished company. We are honoured to have Her Majesty the Queen represented by Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra. We are also happy to have with us the Hon. Angus Ogilvy, the Hon. Malcolm Fraser and Mrs. Fraser, the Hon. Tun Razak and Toh Puan Raha, the Hon. Adams-Schneider and Mrs. Adams-Schneider, the Rt. Hon. Fred. Peart and Mrs. Peart. 145 years ago, five years after he founded Singapore, Stamford Raffles took over four months travelling from Bencoolen to London. But for modern transportation, we would not have had this occasion graced by our distinguished guests. lky/1969/lky0808c.doc 2 Change is a companion of life. But in no period of human history have the changes been as spectacular as those in the last 30 years since the Second World War. And it has been going at a geometrically increasing speed, until two men have set foot on the moon. There are few events in life which are inevitable. However the declared policies of Britain to withdraw from East of Suez, the painful American experience in Vietnam, and their President's pronouncement that there will be no further Vietnam's, these make it likely that there will be momentous changes in Southeast Asia. -
Population in Brief 2019
Population in Brief 2019 Population in Brief 2019 CONTENTS OVERVIEW 3 KEY INDICATORS 4 OVERALL POPULATION 5 AGEING 8 MARRIAGE & PARENTHOOD 11 IMMIGRATION & CITIZENS BY DESCENT 16 1 Population in Brief 2019 ANNEX Overall Population Table 1: Total population 18 Table 2: Singapore citizens by age group, ethnic group and gender 19 Table 3: Ethnic mix of citizen population 20 Table 4: Overseas Singaporean population 20 Ageing Table 5: Old-age support ratio 20 Table 6: Median age 21 Marriage & Parenthood Table 7: Proportion of singles among citizen males / females aged 21 25 – 49 years by age group Table 8: Proportion of singles among citizens by age group, gender and 22 highest qualification attained Table 9: Number of marriages by residency status of grooms and brides 23 Table 10: General marriage rates 23 Table 11: Median age at first marriage 23 Table 12: Origins of non-citizen spouses married to citizens 24 (for marriages in stated year) Table 13: Median age of mothers at first birth by residency status of mothers 25 Table 14: Average number of children born to ever-married females aged 25 30 – 49 years by residency status of females Table 15: Proportion of ever-married females aged 30 – 49 years who are 25 without children by residency status of females Table 16: Number of births by birth order and residency status 26 Table 17: Resident total fertility rate by ethnic group 26 Immigration Table 18: Profile of SCs and PRs granted in 2018 27 2 Population in Brief 2019 OVERVIEW Population in Brief is an annual publication providing key updates and trends on Singapore’s population. -
Singlish to English
TO English Singlish In a country like Singapore, where a non-native language is adopted as a native language, the style, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, etc. will have its own flavour and even its own unique code of usage, like a grammar. This chapter will focus on specific problems students have when studying English in Singapore. A comparison will be made between standard English and Singlish in terms of structure and form. It should be noted that Singlish and Singapore English are two very different things. A person who speaks Singapore English uses standard grammar and vocabulary but pronounces words the way most Singaporean English speakers do. Singlish, on the other hand, includes the same kind of pronunciation, although Singlish speakers may have a stronger accent in that some sounds are changed or dropped entirely. 1. CAN and the omission of the subject. In Chinese, the verb “can” has different meanings. One means ability (I can speak English) and the other meaning possibility (We can go now) or permission (We can’t smoke here), etc. The biggest difference in these expressions between Chinese and English (and Malay too) is that in Chinese and Malay, “can” is sometimes used without the subject, as it is not necessary when the meaning is understood. Also, in Chinese, a simple question marker “mah” is used to make questions (in Malay, it is necessary only to change intonation for a question). This “mah” cannot be translated into a word in English because we change word order and intonation to make questions. The result is often sentences like these: Can go? This one can? Can? Cannot. -
Kodrah Kristang: the Initiative to Revitalize the Kristang Language in Singapore
Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 19 Documentation and Maintenance of Contact Languages from South Asia to East Asia ed. by Mário Pinharanda-Nunes & Hugo C. Cardoso, pp.35–121 http:/nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/sp19 2 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24906 Kodrah Kristang: The initiative to revitalize the Kristang language in Singapore Kevin Martens Wong National University of Singapore Abstract Kristang is the critically endangered heritage language of the Portuguese-Eurasian community in Singapore and the wider Malayan region, and is spoken by an estimated less than 100 fluent speakers in Singapore. In Singapore, especially, up to 2015, there was almost no known documentation of Kristang, and a declining awareness of its existence, even among the Portuguese-Eurasian community. However, efforts to revitalize Kristang in Singapore under the auspices of the community-based non-profit, multiracial and intergenerational Kodrah Kristang (‘Awaken, Kristang’) initiative since March 2016 appear to have successfully reinvigorated community and public interest in the language; more than 400 individuals, including heritage speakers, children and many people outside the Portuguese-Eurasian community, have joined ongoing free Kodrah Kristang classes, while another 1,400 participated in the inaugural Kristang Language Festival in May 2017, including Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and the Portuguese Ambassador to Singapore. Unique features of the initiative include the initiative and its associated Portuguese-Eurasian community being situated in the highly urbanized setting of Singapore, a relatively low reliance on financial support, visible, if cautious positive interest from the Singapore state, a multiracial orientation and set of aims that embrace and move beyond the language’s original community of mainly Portuguese-Eurasian speakers, and, by design, a multiracial youth-led core team. -
Singapore 2019 International Religious Freedom Report
SINGAPORE 2019 INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM REPORT Executive Summary The constitution, laws, and policies provide for religious freedom, subject to restrictions relating to public order, public health, and morality. The government continued to ban Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (Unification Church). The government restricted speech or actions it perceived as detrimental to “religious harmony.” In October parliament passed legislation (not yet in effect at year’s end) that will allow the minister of home affairs to take immediate action against individuals deemed to have insulted a religion or to have incited violence or feelings of enmity against a religious group. The same bill will limit foreign funding to, leadership of, and influence over, local religious organizations. There is no legal provision for conscientious objection to military service, including on religious grounds. Jehovah’s Witnesses reported 11 conscientious objectors remained detained at year’s end. The government continued to ban all religious processions on foot, except for those of three Hindu festivals, including Thaipusam, and it reduced restrictions on the use of live music during Thaipusam. Authorities cancelled a concert by Swedish band Watain after public complaints that the group was offensive towards Christians and Jews. Authorities banned a foreign clergyman from preaching in Singapore after he refused to return to the country for a police investigation into anti-Muslim comments he had reportedly made at a Christian evangelical conference in 2018. The government made multiple high-level affirmations of the importance of religious harmony and respect for religious differences, including in June during a 1,000-person international conference it had organized to discuss religious diversity and cohesion in diverse societies. -
Introducing Target Into Singapore 1
Running head: INTRODUCING TARGET INTO SINGAPORE 1 Introducing Target into Singapore Yealim Ko A Senior Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation in the Honors Program Liberty University Fall 2013 INTRODUCING TARGET INTO SINGAPORE 2 Acceptance of Senior Honors Thesis This Senior Honors Thesis is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation from the Honors Program of Liberty University. ______________________________ Kendrick W. Brunson, D.B.A. Thesis Chair ______________________________ Nancy J. Kippenhan, M.B.A. Committee Member ______________________________ JJ Cole, Ph.D. Committee Member ______________________________ Brenda Ayres, Ph.D. Honors Director ______________________________ Date INTRODUCING TARGET INTO SINGAPORE 3 Abstract The global business trends point to international expansions with corporations increasingly turning to emerging markets for new opportunities to grow and create new sources of revenues. While the BRIC countries including Brazil, Russia, India, and China remain at the center of attention from global industries, the surrounding countries in Asia including Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore emerge as potential markets because although smaller in size, the surrounding countries with fast growing economy and consumer demand for foreign goods suggest large profit potentials. Considering the increasing trend of going abroad in the retail industry (S&P, 2013), the paper is an analysis of the potential of Singapore as a desirable market for U.S. retail industry by conducting a feasibility analysis of implementing the Target store brand into Singapore. The analysis includes cultural analysis, economic analysis, and market audit as well as competitive market analysis which will, in turn, provide deeper understanding of the existing markets in Singapore; therefore, provided basis for potential market expansion of other domestic business into Singapore.