Singaporean Hokkien

Singaporean Hokkien^[b] is a local variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively in Singapore. Within Chinese linguistic academic circles, this dialect is known as Singaporean Ban-lam Gu.^[c] It bears similarities with the Amoy^[d] spoken in Amoy, now better known as Xiamen, as well as Taiwanese Hokkien which is spoken in Taiwan.^[6]

Hokkien is the Min Nan pronunciation for the province of Fujian, and is generally the term used by the Chinese in Southeast Asia to refer to the 'Banlam' dialect.^[e] Singaporean Hokkien generally views Amoy as its prestige dialect, and its accent is predominantly based on a mixture of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speech, with a greater inclination towards the former.

Like many spoken languages in Singapore, Singaporean Hokkien is influenced by other languages or dialects spoken in Singapore. For instance, Singaporean Hokkien is influenced to a certain degree by Teochew, and is sometimes regarded by non-Singaporean speakers as a combined Hokkien–Teochew speech. In addition, it has many loanwords from Singapore's four official languages of English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil.

Nevertheless, the grammar and tones of Singaporean Hokkien are still largely based on Banlam. When compared to the Taiwanese accent^[f] spoken in Tainan and Kaohsiung, the accent and pronunciation of Singaporean Hokkien inclines toward the Quanzhou accent, which is also close to the pronunciation of Taipei and Xiamen, and is less close to that of Tainan, which has a greater inclination towards the Zhangzhou accent.^[g]

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