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sunday, march 21^st, 2026

on july 3^rd, 2020, a week before singapore's 14^th general election held amidst the covid-19 pandemic, the elections department put out a series of videos in various local languages detailing safe voting procedures for seniors. most notably, instead of the usual practice of limiting announcements to solely the national languages of english, malay, mandarin and tamil, videos were produced in the officially-denigrated sinitic languagues of hokkien, teochew, cantonese, and hainanese. (strangely, hakka was excluded from the list, despite having more speakers than hainanese in singapore.)

while i may be six years late, i couldn't possibly pass up the opportunity to transcribe these videos and use them as comparative texts. below are the contents of the five videos in sinitic in both chinese characters and their respective romanisations. the characters used for hokkien and teochew are those used in traditional songbooks, largely sourced from the taiwanese character field. in lieu of a similar database for hainanese, the characters used for it are generally based off the hokkien.

relevant links

• hokkien pronunciation annotator (in tâi-lô) by ì-thoân kho-ki
• hokkien romanisation converter by ì-thoân kho-ki
• teochew pronunciation annotator (in pêng¹im¹) by brandon seah
• teochew romanisation converter by brandon seah
• hainanese pronunciation annotator (in hainanese transliteration) on cháofāyīn.com

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