Out of respect for its three main ethnic communities, Singapore has adopted Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil, along with English, as its official languages.

English, however, is the functional language. I quote Lee Kuan Yew, who was speaking in the United States last October: "We needed a common language. English is not any group's mother tongue, so no one gained any advantage. We have not forced or pressure cooked a national identity. We aimed for integration, not assimilation."

And, by the way, the Malays weren't the "original" inhabitants of Singapura. Indigenous peoples lived there thousands of years before the Indo-Malay people (migrating southward from primarily southern China) showed up.

[This message has been edited by crazycrab955 (edited 12-22-2002).]