Singapore Stories: Language, Class, and the Chinese of Singapore, ...

in tandem with its trade, the value of the latter rising to more than 2 billion Straits dollars by 1926. ¹⁸

Not all Chinese were first-generation migrants, as there was already a substantial Chinese presence on the Malay Peninsula itself. More importantly, apart from speaking a variety of Malay, a small but significant group of the peranakan also spoke English, the result of either contact with the British through the process of trade, or of living under direct colonial rule in Penang and (later) Malacca. ¹⁹ With the establishment of a free port in Singapore, many peranakan made their way to the island in search of profit and opportunities. ²⁰

With the injection of labour into Singapore also came an influx oflanguages and dialects. Before the revolution of 1911 and the May Fourth Movement, there was no institutional or concerted effort to create a common language among the Chinese. Within the Chinese language itself, there are at least five further groupings: the Wu, Min, Yue, Hakka, and Mandarin. ²¹ While written Chinese in its logographic form can easily be understood across dialect groups with the provision that one is literate, the vocabulary and structural differences of the five groups render users between families of dialects unintelligible to one another. ²² In Singapore, the main Chinese languages in use were the Min (mainly Hokkien and Teochew) and Yue (largely Cantonese), with smaller amounts of Hakka and Mandarin users, ²³ in the latter case at least initially.

Many of these dialect groups, such as the Hokkien and the Teochew, felt animosity toward each other that can be traced back to triad and regional rivalry in China, and this bitterness often erupted into outbreaks of deadly violence up until the 1960s. ²⁴ The violent clashes between the Hokkien and Teochew groups further serve as an example of the divisions within the community and challenge any attempt to simplistically classify the Chinese migrants as a singular cell. What can be inferred is that the various dialect communities, despite their differences, saw themselves as Chinese in relation to the other ethnic groups on the island, yet referred to themselves through their respective communal and dialect loyalties in their relations with each other.