Singapore's Socio-linguistic Study

Singapore is a small island country with limited natural resources but different ethnic groups. Its remarkable economic achievements have resulted from strategic planning, systematic management and full tapping of everyone's talent. The national language policies and pedagogy, which aim at the building, sustaining and development of the nation, have been formulated with a farsighted perspective and weighed meticulously to prepare Singapore against adversities that small countries cannot withstand. This initiated my research into Singapore's language policies and social linguistic phenomena.This thesis, from the perspective of macro social linguistics, has conducted research and analysis on the existing social linguistic status in Singapore. It attempts an inclusive and comprehensive study on the contemporary social linguistics of Singapore, which has been achieved by means of tracing the development of a multi-lingual society, collecting factors which impact competition and hierarchy of different languages, observing the relationship between expected outcome of national policies and the actual results, exploring potential problems in practice, and foreseeing developmental trends of all languages.This thesis has conducted detailed analysis on some specific domains of social linguistics through sample survey, type investigation, case study, data collection and observation. The sample survey in this thesis is fairly comprehensive, covering all sectors of society and people ranging from political and civil leaders, entrepreneurs and professionals, to practitioners in various industries, as well as young students. The findings are representative of the linguistic status of different social strata in Singapore.Domains such as workplace language study, bilingual ability investigation, case study of code transformation between different social strata have not been explored by other scholars so far, hence innovation of my research.Based upon analysis of the national conditions, national policies and current social linguistic status in Singapore, this thesis attempts to explore patterns of political and business languages, since these two domains are the core of social linguistic ecology, and language is a very sensitive political issue in the multi-racial society. In communication with the people, political leaders and government agencies must take the acceptance of the people into consideration and at the same time accommodate between various languages, and this attributes to the uniqueness of Singapore's political language. In the field of business, however, market scale and cost are the decisive factors for the choice of languages, and cultural background exerts a profound impact on business language style.The conclusion of this thesis is that in Singapore, an Asian country with unique national situation, English is the major official language, and the government implements bilingual education so as to strengthen human resources. In this multilingual society, different industries have different language requirements on the employees in the workplace, and educational backgrounds and work environment contribute to the differences in people's command of languages. Singaporeans in general possess multi-linguistic capabilities with different levels of proficiency, and factors such as the content of conversation, the addressee, the occasion, the group solidarity and the efficiency of conversation are likely to trigger code transforming, the frequency of which is relatively high in familiar occasions, especially among people of similar background, and low in formal, official communication. Political languages are generally concise, vivid, amiable and efficient, while business languages highlight effectiveness and convenience in communication.