Quora Answer: Is Singapore Primarily Anglophone or Sinophone?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Is Singapore primarily Anglophone or Sinophone?”

Singapore is primarily Anglophone.  You could get buy speaking no Mandarin, but it is impossible to get a lot of things done if you speak no English because English is the language of business and governance.  70% of the population is ethnically Chinese.  That does not mean that they all speak Mandarin or any Chinese dialects.  Peranakan Chinese speak primarily Malay and English.  Many of them speak a Chinese dialect, but proficiency, particularly with the younger generation, varies.  There are ethnic Chinese who are not Peranakan, who have no fluency in any Chinese dialects.

And then, there is the other 30% of people in Singapore who are not Chinese.  Many of us do know Mandarin and other dialects.  I speak Mandarin myself, and like any good Singaporean who served National Service, I have some facility with Hokkien and Teowchew.  But that does not mean I am obliged to use Mandarin.

There are times, dealing with service people hired from China, I have refused to use Mandarin just to make a point.  We are not China.  We are Singapore, and I expect everyone to have some facility with English.  If companies insist on hiring Chinese who do not know English, I have no qualms making things difficult by pretending I do not understand them, and insist on seeing their manager.  If I bothered to learn their language, and learn Malay, I see no excuse for these people to not know some English.  I am not asking them to elucidate the annotated works of William Shakespeare.