National
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What is Lingua Franca? Bahasa? no that is the National official language. Today English or spoken in the vernacular form of Singlish is the Lingua franca or the National language in that sense of adoption! In Singapore Singlish is the National lingua franca! Lingua Franca is a pidgin, a trade language used by numerous language communities around the Mediterranean, to communicate with others whose language they did not speak. It is, in fact, the mother of all pidgins, seemingly in use since the Middle Ages and surviving until the nineteenth century, when it disappeared with hardly a trace, probably under the onslaught of the triumphant French language, leaving only a few anecdotal quotations in the writings of travelers or observers, an imperfect French/Lingua Franca vocabulary (1830) meant for settlers in the newly annexed territory of Algeria, and some other rather strange detritus which I have tried to put together in the Glossary in a consistent fashion. The only oral survival of which I am aware for certain is the initial numerals of Lingua Franca in the mouths of the present-day children of Jerusalem, who use them as a counting-out rhyme, innocently unaware that they are not mere nonsense syllables, but the sad remnant of a once highly useful means of communication, an informal Mediterranean Esperanto. Like other pidgins, it had a limited vocabulary and a sharply circumscribed grammar, and lacked those things, such as verb tenses and case endings, that add specificity to human speech.
In other regions of the world, other languages perform the function of a lingua franca: Portuguese served as lingua franca in Africa and Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries. Swahili in East Africa, Russian in areas formerly associated with the Soviet Union, German in much of Eastern Europe until after World War II, Hindustani (along with English) in India, Malay in South-East Asia, Bislama in the Pacific Islands, and various Pidgin languages in other locations and times. Until the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Classical Chinese served as both a lingua franca and diplomatic language for Far East Asia, used by China, Korea, Japan, the Ryukyus, and Vietnam in interstate communications. Currently, among most Chinese speaking communities, Mandarin Chinese serves the function of providing a common spoken language between speakers of different and mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects. In Switzerland, which has four different official languages, English serves as a lingua franca with citizens and the relatively high (20%) foreign population.
[edit] Uses of the Vernacular
Vernacular Chinese (pinyin: báihuà; Wade-Giles: paihua) is a style or register of the written Chinese language essentially modeled after the spoken language and associated with Standard Mandarin. This term is not to be confused with the various present-day vernacular spoken varieties of Chinese. Since the early twentieth century, Vernacular Chinese has been the standard of writing for speakers of all varieties of spoken Chinese throughout China, succeeding Classical Chinese, the former written standard used in China since the time of Confucius. The term Standard Written Chinese now often refers to Vernacular Chinese.
Since the late 1920s, nearly all Chinese newspapers, books, and official and legal documents have been written in Vernacular Chinese. However, the tone/register and the choice of vocabulary may be formal or informal, depending on the context. Generally, the more formal the register of Vernacular Chinese, the greater the resemblance to Classical Chinese. Since the transition, it has been, however, extremely rare for a text to be written in predominantly Classical Chinese. Only educated speakers have full reading comprehension of Classical texts, and very few are able to write proficiently in Classical Chinese.
- Vernacular architecture is a term from academic architecture to categorize structures built outside of academic tradition
- Who are the Malay National here ? What are Chinese Nationals ? This is a tricky question with oxymoronic answers!
A Malay National? There is none here , we have Malay people only! They are Singaporean citizens! What about Chinese national here , are there any? Of course, these are foreign workers who came from China to work in the construction industry!
see figural usage as in figures of speech
<Singapore stub needing expansion>
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