Statistical Modeling of Current Linguistic Realities Around the World: The Case of Singapore

The English language has experienced an unprecedented spread in the last decades due to colonization and globalization. Nowadays, non-native speakers clearly outnumber native speakers of English, but a new trend towards new first language varieties of English has set in, in particular in Asian and African contexts. This not only changes the general character of the English language but questions old norms of correctness and standards for local and worldwide teaching contexts. By means of statistical modeling and on the basis of the example of Singapore, we show that English is not a monolithic whole (as often been assumed by non-linguists) but a complex language system, stratified by a number of social variables such as age, gender, and ethnicity.