Photo by Clementrossignol.

Wade-Giles or Pinyin?

Singaporean Taoists are moving to provide all their literature (canonical texts, websites, etc.) in English as well as Mandarin, and the newest priest-training college also plans to be bilingual. This is no huge surprise in an ex-British colony, but I was surprised to see the breakdown according to the 2000 census cited on the CIA Factbook (not Facebook). Mandarin is the most spoken language at 35% of the population, followed by English at 23%. Hokkien comes in 4th at 11.7% and Cantonese 5th at 5.7%. The article, from the Straits Times, gives the Taoist segment as 9% of the population, but they’ve clearly rounded the census figures up from the actual figure of 8.5%.

Singapore’s dominant religion is Buddhism, at 42.5%, although even they have moved to include English-speaking devotees with one monastery launching a magazine targeting young people, as well as what the Straits journo describes as “the Net”.

Yen Feng ‘English-friendly religion‘, Straits Times (4/10/09)