Linguistic landscape in Singapore : what does the HDB space reveal?

• Main Author: Ang, Venna Yu Yan
• Other Authors: Francis C. K. Wong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Humanities::Linguistics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/138459
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This study sets out to explore the linguistic landscape of Singapore’s Public Housing Estates, also commonly known as HDB flats. Existing research on Singapore’s linguistic landscapes are usually done in the public domain where signs are generally top-down and heavily regulated by the government. Little research has been done within the community of Singaporeans besides shop signs and community clubs. There are plenty of studies on official signs versus non-official signs. The housing area, however, has an abundance of what I coined as Semi-official signs. These are heaps of signs put up by the Community Clubs and Residents’ Committee who are volunteer run associations by the People’s Association – a statutory board created in 1960 to promote racial harmony and social cohesion within the community. This is a quantitative study of signs in Singapore, where we attempt to decipher language use patterns and its correlation with the types of linguistic landscape actors and whether the demographics of the resident population plays a role in the frequency of certain languages.