Singapore ETHNIC AND LINGUISTIC GROUPS
Wife of Chinese millionaire, late nineteenth century
Courtesy Library of Congress
Chinese medicine shop in Chinatown
Courtesy Ong Tien Kwan
Ethnic Categories
Since the city's foundation in 1819, Singapore's
population has
been polyglot and multiethnic. Chinese have been in the
majority
since 1830 but have themselves been divided into sometimes
antagonistic segments speaking mutually unintelligible
Chinese
languages. The colonial society was compartmented into
ethnic and
linguistic groups, which were in turn associated with
distinct
political and economic functions. Singapore has never had
a
dominant culture to which immigrants could assimilate nor
a common
language. This was the foundation upon which the efforts
of the
government and ruling party to create a common Singaporean
identity
in the 1970s and 1980s rested.
On July 1989 Singapore's 2,674,362 residents were
divided into
2,043,213 Chinese (76.4 percent), 398,480 Malays (14.9
percent),
171,160 Indians (6.4 percent), and 61,511 others (2.3
percent) (see
table 3, Appendix). The proportions of the ethnic
components had
remained substantially unchanged since the 1920s. Although
the
ethnic categories were meaningful in the Singaporean
context, each
subsumed much more internal variation than was suggested
by the
term "race." Chinese included people from mainland China,
Taiwan,
and Hong Kong, as well as Chinese from all the countries
of
Southeast Asia, including some who spoke Malay or English
as their
first language. The Malays included not only those from
peninsular
Malaya, but also immigrants or their descendants from
various parts
of the Indonesian archipelago, such as Sumatra, the Riau
Islands
south of Singapore, Java, and Sulawesi. Those people who
in
Indonesia were members of such distinct ethnic groups as
Acehnese,
Minangkabau, Buginese, Javanese, or Sundanese were in
Singapore all
considered "Malays." Indians comprised people stemming
from
anywhere in pre-1947 British India, the present states of
India,
Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and from Sri Lanka and Burma.
Singapore's
Indian "race" thus contained Tamils, Malayalis, Sikhs,
Gujaratis,
Punjabis, and others from the subcontinent who shared
neither
physical appearance, language, nor religion.
Data as of December 1989
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