Singapore talks!

hahahahah this is a demn funny abstract from wikitravel.com http://wikitravel.org/en/Singapore.. lets go visit Singapore! erm.. now wait a min....

"Malay may be enshrined in the Constitution as the 'national' language, but in practice the most common language is English, spoken by almost every Singaporean under the age of 40. On the other hand, Malay is spoken mainly by the older generation and is almost exclusively restricted to ethnic Malays in the younger generation. However, the distinctive local patois Singlish may be hard to understand at times, as it incorporates slang words and phrases from other languages, including various Chinese dialects, Malay and Tamil. It also incorporates slang from British and American English, and has a queer way of structuring sentences, due to the original speakers being mostly Chinese. Complex consonant clusters are simplified, plurals disappear, verb tenses are replaced by adverbs, questions are altered to fit the Chinese syntax and semirandom particles (especially the infamous "lah") appear:

Singlish: You wan beer or not? -- No lah, drink five botol oreddi.
English: Do you want a beer? -- No, thanks; I've already had five bottles.

Thanks to nationwide language education campaigns, most younger Singaporeans are, however, capable of speaking so-called "Good English" when necessary. To avoid unintentional offense, it's best to start off with standard English and only shift to simplified pidgin if it becomes evident that the other person cannot follow you. Try to resist the temptation to sprinkle your speech with unnecessary Singlishisms: you'll get a laugh if you do it right, but it sounds grating and patronizing if you do it wrong.

Singapore's other official languages are Mandarin Chinese and Tamil. Mandarin is spoken by most of the educated Singaporean Chinese while Tamil is spoken by most of the Indians. Various Chinese dialects (especially Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese) are also spoken between ethnic Chinese of the same dialect group. Other Indian languages, such as Punjabi among the Sikhs, are also spoken. "

it's quite a down to earth description of Singapore. hahah i wonder how they do it..