SINGAPOREAN MANDARIN BETWEEN DOMINANT VARIETY AND LOCAL IDENTITY

Abstract

Mandarin, also known as ‘Standard Modern Chinese’, is a pluricentric language, and also the most important Sinitic language, both in terms of prestige and number of speakers. Like most pluricentric languages, Mandarin too has a dominant variant, Putonghua, i.e. the standard of the People’s Republic of China, and non-dominant variants. In this paper, we will focus on one of them, Singapore Mandarin, one of the official languages of the Republic of Singapore. By means of the theory of pluricentrism, we will try to demonstrate that this non-dominant variant, having developed far from the centre, is the result of two opposing forces: a gradual approach to the dominant variant and the realisation that, in order to represent the country’s reality and convey Singaporean identity, the language must necessarily move away – in some respects – from it.