A unique linguistic heritage

4 national languages from 4 language families offering a 360° view

Author

Linguafour
July 02, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Singapore is one of just four countries in the world to have four official languages, and it is the only country whose official languages each represent a different language family.  

The nation’s official languages also represent four out of the world’s six largest language families.  English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil give citizens of the little Red Dot access to more than 30% of the countries of the world, which accounts for 40% of its surface area and 60% of its people.1

Language families

Humans use more than 7000 languages, which have been grouped into more than 135 language families. 70% of people speak a language from one of the top six language families (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Austroneisan, Afro-Asisatic and Dravidian)2 .  English (1452m speakers), Mandarin (1118m), Swahili (71.4m), Bahasa (199m) and Arabic (274m) are the most spoken languages in each of the top five families respectively.  Telugu (95.7m) and Tamil (86.4m) are the most spoken languages in the sixth.3  

National Languages

Officially, the 210 nations of the world use just 192 different languages.  63% of countries have one official language; 27% have two; 6% have three.  Four countries have four official languages, and only five countries have more than four.4   

83% of those 192 languages are an official language in just one country.  By contrast, eight languages (English, French, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German and Italian) are an official language in more than three-quarters of the nations of the world.  

Of course those countries are of unequal size, both in terms of population and surface area.  Mandarin Chinese, for example, is only an official language in three places which account for just 7% of the world’s surface area, but they are home to 18% of humanity.5 

So if we swap German and Italian for Mandarin Chinese and Bahasa in the list of eight languages above, we will cover fewer countries but they account for 86% of the world's surface area and 80% of humanity.

Languages in Singapore

Whilst English is the lingua franca for Singapore, the nation has from the beginning taken great care to preserve the “heritage languages” of its citizens.  The focus has been on each ethnic group maintaining links with its ancestry.  As such, Singaporeans of Chinese descent have been encouraged to learn Mandarin; those of Malaysian descent Malay; and those of Indian descent Tamil. This has helped to preserve the cultural diversity that is one of the distinctive strengths of the nation.  

In reality, however, the forbears of Chinese Singaporeans are as likely to have spoken Hokkien or Teowchew as they are Mandarin, whilst the predecessors of Indian Singaporeans are as likely to have spoken Punjabi or Hindi as they are Tamil.  And naturally the cuisines, traditions and other cultural norms which were passed on may be quite different from those of people from Beijing or Tamil Nadu.  

Linguistic heritage

As the generations go by, fewer and fewer Singaporeans consider “home” to be the land of their ancestors anyway.  The key question now is not so much “where did our family come from” (because we no longer have plans ever to go back) but rather “where do we come from?”  For those who answer “from Singapore,” the practical concerns are: “what do we have as Singaporeans?” and “what are we going to do with it?”  Heritage is less about looking back to where we came from separately and more about looking forward to where we are going together.  In that sense, Mandarin is as much a part of the Indian and Malay Singaporean’s heritage as it is the Chinese.  Likewise for Malay and Tamil.

How do 4 languages from 4 different language families offer a 360° view? Consider the example of the Blue Pea.

Photo credits: Joe Green on Unsplash & Bernard Spragg, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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