Furthermore, Chinese Singaporeans aren't Chinese, they're
Singaporean.
Singaporean chinese are mostly hokkiens, teochews, hakkas,
hainanese, henghua and cantonese.
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.
http://countrystudies.us/singapore/16.htm
Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan
Associations
http://www.sfcca.sg/?action-viewnews-itemid-832
Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan
http://www.shhk.com.sg
http://www.tungann.org.sg
