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A lack of contact between Singapore and China from 1949 to 1979 meant that Singaporean Mandarin had to invent new words to fit the local context, as well as borrow words from Taiwanese Mandarin or other Chinese varieties that were spoken in Singapore. As a result, new Mandarin words proprietary to Singapore were invented.
The use of Mandarin in the Chinese-medium schools led its use mainly by the Chinese-educated or Chinese elites in Singapore. After Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew announced and kickstarted the Speak Mandarin Campaign in 1979, the Promote Mandarin Council started research on Mandarin standardisation based on case studies in mainland China and Taiwan.
This was accomplished by adding the digit "9" to the beginning of any phone number that started with a "9" (government and semi-government connections), and adding the digit "3" to any phone numbers that did not start with the number "9". [1] It is common to write phone numbers as (0xx) yyyyyyy, where xx is the area code.
Before 1969, Singapore used traditional Chinese characters. From 1969, the Ministry of Education promulgated the Table of Simplified Characters (simplified Chinese: 简体字表; traditional Chinese: 簡體字表; pinyin: jiǎntǐzì biǎo), which differed from the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme of the China. [1]
This led to many Chinese Singaporeans tending to mix large numbers of English professional terms into Mandarin at work, instead of using Chinese technical terms. As such, a form of Singdarin spoken at work appears, resulting in some degree of communication barrier at work between the Chinese Singaporeans and the Chinese from China or Taiwan.
Until 1985, subscribers' telephone numbers in Singapore were five and six digits. Five digits were introduced in 1960s, whereas 5-digit and 6-digit phone numbers were introduced in 1960s as fixed lines grew, but in that year, these changed to seven digits as the introduction of new towns arose (Tampines, Jurong East, Bukit Batok, Yishun and Hougang) and a large number of new numbers were required.
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Users can switch carriers while keeping number and prefix (so prefixes are not tightly coupled to a specific carrier). If there is only 32.. followed by any other, shorter number, like 32 51 724859, this is the number of a normal phone, not a mobile. 46x: Join (discontinued mobile phone service provider) [3] 47x: Proximus (or other) 48x