South Asian languages in Singapore

Today, most ethnic Indians in Singapore are locally born second, third, fourth or even fifth generation descendants of immigrant forefathers.

Ancestral ethno-linguistic identity is captured under the category of 'dialect group' (although this term may be more appropriate for describing the linguistic composition of the majority Chinese, rather than Indians).

Given their small absolute and relative numbers, the following table adapts the 2010 census data by combining the 'Sikh' (12,952) and 'Punjabi' (5,672) category under 'Punjabi'.

The percentages in the table refer to the proportion of each language group within the larger Resident Indian community in Singapore.

Singapore's Indian community is characterised by an ethnic Tamil majority (54.18%) and a large number of smaller groups.

Malayalees from Kerala in South India form the second largest community, making up 7.57% of the Indian population.

Although they are counted as Indian in official statistics, a substantial number of these people consider themselves to be ethnically and culturally Malay, and many of them may be racially mixed.

As part of Singapore's bilingual education policy, Tamil is offered as a second language option in most public schools.

Other Tamil media include the (Sun TV) cable television channel, provided by the main cable television operator in Singapore, StarHub, and the local Tamil-language radio station (Oli 96.8FM), which is run by the state-owned MediaCorp broadcasting company.

[5] Students of other non-Tamil Indian language communities can choose to offer Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi or Urdu as their Mother-Tongue at the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) and the GCE ‘N’, ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examinations Mother-Tongue Language Policy.