Serene Ng

Abstract

Singapore Mandarin (华语huáyǔ) is the common language of Singapore's ethnic Chinese. As language and culture are closely related, changes in society will first reflect in the lexicons. With the aid of a historical corpus, which consists of written Singapore Mandarin from 1990 to 2009, with 1,255,285 Chinese characters, the study aims to uncover the lexicons variants of Singapore Mandarin. Investigations and findings show that the lexicon variants of Singapore Mandarin drew from three key areas: heritage words from ancient Chinese, borrowed words from other languages, as well as new created words.

Remarks : "Corpus, ICT, and Language Education" (2010) UK: University of Strathclyde