Singapore's Chinese residents were the descendants of immigrants
from coastal southeastern China, an area of much linguistic and
subcultural variation. The migrants spoke at least five mutually
unintelligible Chinese languages, each of which contained numerous
regional dialects.
Singaporean usage, however, following the common Chinese
tendency to assert cultural unity, referred to mutually
unintelligible speech systems as "dialects." All the Chinese
languages and dialects shared common origins and grammatical
structures and could be written with the same Chinese idiograms,
which represent meaning rather than sound.
The primary divisions in the immigrant Chinese population
therefore followed linguistic lines, dividing the populace into
segments that were called dialect communities, speech groups, or
even "tribes". In the nineteenth century, each speech group had its
own set of associations, ranging from secret societies to
commercial bodies to schools and temples. The groups communicated
through leaders conversant with other Chinese languages or through
a third language such as Malay or English.
The nomenclature for Chinese speech groups common in Singapore
and Southeast Asia is confusing, partly because each group can be
referred to by several alternate names. Most of the names refer to
places in China with characteristic regional speech or dialects,
and include the names of provinces, counties, and major cities.
The distribution of Singapore's Chinese speech groups has
remained fairly stable since 1900. The largest group were the
Hokkien, who came from the area around the trading port of Xiamen
(Amoy) in southern Fujian Province.
Hokkien traders and merchants had been active in Southeast Asia
for centuries before the foundation of Singapore. In 1980 they made
up 43 percent of Singapore's Chinese population. The second largest
group were the Teochiu (sometimes written Teochew), comprising 22
percent of the Chinese population. Their home area is Chaozhou, in
Chao'an County in northeastern Guangdong Province, which has as its
major port the city of Shantou (Swatow). Chaozhou is immediately
south of the Hokkien-speaking area of Fujian, and both Teochiu and
Hokkien are closely related languages of the Minnan group, mutually
intelligible to native speakers after sufficient practice.
Hainanese, from the island of Hainan south of Guangdong, made up 8
percent of the population. Hainan was settled by people from
southern Fujian who arrived by sea, and Hainanese is a Minnan
language whose native speakers can understand Hokkien or Teochiu
with relatively little difficulty after practice.
Speakers of
Minnan languages thus made up 72 percent of the Chinese
population, for whom Hokkien served as a lingua
franca, the language of the marketplace.
The third most numerous group were Cantonese, from the lowlands
of central Guangdong Province around the port city of Guangzhou
(Canton). They made up 16 percent of the Chinese population.
Hakka, a group
scattered through the interior hills of southern China and
generally considered migrants from northern China, were 7 percent.
Other Chinese call them "guest people", and the term Hakka (Kejia
in pihyih romanization) is Cantonese for "guest
families."
There also were small numbers of people from the coastal
counties of northern Fujian, called Hokchia, Hokchiu, and Henghua,
whose northern Fujian (Minbei) languages are quite distinct from
those of southern Fujian and seldom spoken outside of Fujian. A
final, residual category of Chinese were the "Three Rivers People,"
who came from the provinces north of Guangdong and Fujian. This
group included people from northern and central China, and more
specifically those provinces sharing the word "river"
(jiang) in their names--Jiangxi, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang.
They would have spoken southern Mandarin dialects or the Wu
languages of Shanghai, Ningbo, and Hangzhou. In 1980 they were 1.7
percent of the Chinese population.
A significant category of Chinese, although one not listed in
the census reports, were the Baba Chinese or Straits
Chinese. They were Chinese who after long residence
in Southeast Asia spoke Malay or English as
their first language, and whose culture contained
elements from China, Southeast Asia, and sometimes Europe as
well.
An indication of the size of the Baba Chinese community was
provided by the 1980 census report that 9 percent of Chinese
families spoke English at home. Stereotypically the Baba were the
offspring of Chinese migrants and local women. In the nineteenth century,
they tended to be wealthier and better educated than the mass of
immigrants and to identify more with Singapore and Southeast Asia
than with China.
In spite of their language, the Baba considered themselves
Chinese, retained Chinese kinship patterns and religion, and even
when speaking Malay used a distinct Baba dialect of Malay with many
loan words from Hokkien.
Never a large proportion of Singapore's Chinese population, in
the late nineteenth century they took advantage of opportunities
for education in English and promoted themselves as loyal to
Britain.
In Singapore,
many Baba families spoke English as a first language and produced
many of the leaders of Singapore's independent political movements,
including Lee Kuan Yew.
Although the Baba, in a sense, provided the model for the
current Singaporean who is fluent in English and considers
Singapore as home, the community fragmented in
the early twentieth century as Chinese nationalism spread. After
the 1920s its members gained no advantage, economic or political,
from distinguishing themselves from the rest of the Chinese
population and tended increasingly to become Chinese again, often
learning to speak Chinese as adults.
In the 1980s, Baba culture survived largely in the form of a
well-known cuisine that mixed Chinese and Malay ingredients and in
some families who continued to use English as the language of the
home.
As the majority of the population and the ethnic group that
dominated the political system and state administrative structure,
Singapore's Chinese exhibited the widest range of occupational,
educational, and class status. Those with little or no formal
education occupied the bottom rungs of the occupational hierarchy
and led social lives restricted to fellow members of the same
dialect group.
The level of formal education and language of education--Chinese
or English--divided the Chinese into broad categories. Status for those working in
the internationally oriented private sector or in government
service depended on command of English and educational
qualifications.
In the still
substantial Chinese private sector, status and security rested on a
position in a bounded dialect community and a network of personal
relations established over a lifetime.
Although the latter exclusively Chinese category was shrinking,
by the late 1980s it still contained some quite wealthy men who
helped set the international price of rubber, controlled businesses
with branches in Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and other
countries of the region, and supported Singapore's array of Chinese
charities, hospitals, and education trusts. Singapore's Chinese
society was one with a high degree of social mobility and one in
which status increasingly was determined by educational
qualifications and command of English and Mandarin.
http://www.country-studies.com/singapore/the-chinese.html
