Talk:Demographics of Singapore/Archive 1

This article has a contradiction
This article has a contradiction:

"Malay is the national language, but Chinese, English, and Tamil also are official languages. English is the language of administration and also is widely used in the professions, businesses, and schools."

and then later:

"The only official language of Singapore is English. No other languages are official. Not even Tamil, despite what you may have heard."

Especially the last section sounds POV and should in my opinion be removed in any case. -- MartijnFaassen

The POV-sounding sentence above was put in by an anonymous user, replacing an earlier version that said there are four official languages. The main article on Singapore says four official languages, so that's what I'll believe. I just changed back to the original version. Isomorphic 01:52, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

use census 2000 and Singstat figures with care!
I would like to remind here that official population figures from Singstat refer to RESIDENT population, and do not include 18.3% of Singapore population!!

In this article, most figures are given under the generic term "singapore population" though figures actually refer to RESIDENT population only, while there is NO data available for the non-resident population, except their number: 798,000 in 2005, meaning 18.3% of the population.

In other words, almost everytime a breakdown is given, it actually refers to a selected part of the population. And might give an inaccurate idea to readers.

Why is it important? If you go to Singapore you will fast notice large numbers of non-Chinese (nor malay) workers on the streets, building constructions, etc. You will also notice westerners and japanese, and on sundays you will see hundreds of Filipino maids on Orchard road. You might go to Golden Mile Complex and find yourself in the middle of hundreds of ethnic Thais. Those are all foreigners and will probably individually leave the country, but they are always around as Singapore needs them... and they represent 18.3% of Singapore population, that counts! However, figures are repeated inaccurately again and again in books, articles, documents...

For example, it is just NOT correct to state that "77% of Singapore population are ethnic Chinese". Nobody except Immigration/Singstat could give the exact number, but anybody in Singapore can guess that a big majority of non-residents, if not all, are NOT ethnic Chinese... If you consider that indian or bangladeshi workers represent HALF of non-residents, then you would have 13% of the total population being indian... Another example is religion; I found usual figures for residents, though the reality of the entire population is different: among non-residents, Buddhists are probably a minority, with larger numbers of muslims.

Also, the RESIDENT population itself includes foreigners, who are granted the "Permanent Resident" status. It is important to understand that the difference between the PR in the resident population is only an administrative category away from the foreigners in non-resident population, even though in theory residents are long-term inhabitants. Tlanson 19:59, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

National Language?
The first paragraph says "The country has four official languages, and English is widely used, and Malay is the national language." I was taught that English is the national language in school. FilthyAbraham 07:19, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Your teachers were wrong. From the Singapore constitution:
 * Official languages and national language
 * 153A. —(1) Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English shall be the 4 official languages in Singapore.
 * (2) The national language shall be the Malay language and shall be in the Roman script:

http://statutes.agc.gov.sg/non_version/cgi-bin/cgi_getdata.pl?actno=1999-REVED-CONST&doctitle=CONSTITUTION%20OF%20THE%20REPUBLIC%20OF%20SINGAPORE%0A&date=latest&method=part&segid=931158661-003585 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Piarco girl (talk • contribs) 06:53, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Statistics Link broken
The link for the income statistics (http://www.singstat.gov.sg/papers/c2000/adr-hhinc.pdf) does not work. Please replace. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.132.3.6 (talk) 14:40, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Graph Error
The graph for the religious affiliation of the Chinese ethnicity gives the per cent Buddhist as 34.8%. This should be 54; adding the other percentages will verify this. Coreydragon (talk) 04:55, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Agree even the size of the slice in the pie chart shows this. It's surprising this has not been changed for over a year. Nmisra (talk) 00:47, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Will this ever be updated? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.136.64.58 (talk) 09:01, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Update needed: Census 2010
The data of the 2010 census is already available: Census of Population 2010 Statistical Release 1: Demographic Characteristics, Education, Language and Religion

I updated some of the content already. There is still some work to be done.

Gugganij (talk) 13:08, 28 August 2011 (UTC)

Population density?
The article mentions population density twice in the first two sentences, and the subject never comes up again in the entire rest of the article. Is there really nothing more to say about the 2nd densest country in the world? I would think its extremely high density would merit its own section. Personally, I'd be very interested to read such a section, and I think someone should write it. skeptical scientist (talk) 12:33, 15 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Perhaps, but personally I don't see the need. It's just an artifact of the country being one moderately dense city without much in the way of surrounding rural lands to go with it - sort of "all city, no country". The closest things to "countryside" there are the various nature preserves, the unused military "live fire" reserve, and the Zoo (also a nature preserve). It's like a Miami without a Florida (much less a United States). It's not nearly as dense as a NYC or a metropolitan Tokyo (comparatively about 35% and 100% more dense than Singapore, respectively).


 * Compare with these points: In terms of population density of capital cities, Singapore ranks only 26th and it comes nowhere close to appearing on the list of the denses cities in the world, being less than half as dense as any on that list. Focusing too much on its density by national rank gives a mistaken impression of "2nd most crowded place on earth", when really it's far from it.


 * I suppose a case could be made for including a discussion of density numbers pretty much like this one, but that would be less about Singapore and more about the foibles of numbers and statistics (and apples and oranges). Flj529 (talk) 09:14, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

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