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Singapore Language Planning
In colonial Singapore, the nearest thing to a common
language
had been Bazaar Malay, a form of Malay with simplified
grammar and
a very restricted vocabulary that members of many ethnic
groups
used to communicate in the marketplace. The government
used
English, with translators employed when necessary, as in
the
courts. Among the Chinese a simplified form of Hokkien
served as
the language of the marketplace. The Chinese schools,
which were
founded in large numbers in the early years of the
twentieth
century and associated with the rise of Chinese
nationalism,
attempted to teach in Mandarin Guoyu, the use of which on
such
formal occasions as weddings and Chinese national holiday
celebrations came to carry some prestige. In the
terminology of
sociolinguistics, Singapore's language system was
multilingual and
diglossiac, that is, characterized by two languages or
dialects,
high and low, or classical and vernacular, each used in
different
social contexts and carrying differential prestige. Bazaar
Malay
and market Hokkien were the low languages, employed in the
streets
and market places, and English and Mandarin were the high
languages, used in education, government offices, and
public
celebrations. In addition, such native tongues as pure
Malay,
Teochiu, Tamil, or Punjabi were used in the home and in
gatherings
of members of the same speech group. In a 1972 survey
asking which
language people understood, Hokkien came first, at 73
percent,
followed by Malay, with 57 percent. Malay was the most
important
language for intergroup communication, with almost all the
Indians
and 45 percent of the Chinese claiming to understand it.
English
came second, understood by 47 percent of the total
population. A
follow-up survey in 1978 showed that 67 percent claimed to
understand Malay and 62 percent to comprehend English. As
the 1990s
approached English was replacing Malay as the common
language. It
was used not only as the high language but also, in its
Singlish
variant, as a low language of the streets. Bazaar Malay
was
declining, and Malay in its full native complexity was
increasingly
used only by Malays. Even though it was one of the four
official
languages and the putative "mother tongue" of the Indian
community,
Tamil was used less often and literacy in Tamil was
reported to be
declining.
The most ambitious aspect of Singapore's language
planning and
attempted social engineering was the campaign to replace
the
Chinese "dialects" with Mandarin, called the "mother
tongue." The
Speak Mandarin campaign began in 1979 as a PAP project and
was
subsequently institutionalized in the Mandarin Campaign
Secretariat
in the Ministry of Communications and Information. The
promotion of
Mandarin as a common Chinese language dates back to the
early years
of the century, when it was associated with the rise of
Chinese
nationalism and the foundation of Chinese schools.
Learning
Mandarin would, it was argued, permit all Chinese to
communicate in
their "mother tongue," be useful for doing business with
China,
and, perhaps most important, promote traditional Chinese
values.
All ethnic Chinese were required to study Mandarin through
secondary school and to pass examinations in it for
university
admission. Chinese civil servants took a required 162-hour
conversational Mandarin course, and the Mandarin Campaign
Secretariat coordinated the annual Speak Mandarin
campaigns.
Mandarin classes were offered by the Singapore Chinese
Chamber of
Commerce and Industry and by some native-place and clan
associations. All Chinese television broadcasting was in
Mandarin,
as was most radio broadcasting. Radio programs in Chinese
dialects
were limited to 9:00 P.M. to midnight on the same station
that
broadcast Tamil from 5:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. In 1989
members of
Parliament complained that some residents were tuning in
to
Cantonese opera broadcast by television stations in
neighboring
Malaysia. By late 1988, some 87 percent of the Chinese
population
claimed to be able to speak Mandarin. People did not
agree,
however, on the appropriate social contexts for use of
what was for
everyone a school language. As a result, people tended to
use
English or their native tongue on most everyday occasions.
During
the late 1980s, the Speak Mandarin campaign attempted to
persuade
people to use Mandarin when shopping and targeted taxi
drivers, bus
conductors, and operators of food stalls as workers who
were to use
Mandarin.
The goals of the Speak Mandarin campaign included
improving
communication between Chinese speech groups, teaching
people to
read Chinese, and promoting Confucianism. Some critics
argued that
children were expected to learn two foreign languages in
school
(English and Mandarin) and that for some students the
result was
fluency in neither. The official response was that the
problem
would be avoided if people would speak Mandarin at home.
Some
educators questioned whether a sufficient level of Chinese
literacy
could be achieved with the amount of time the schools
devoted to
Chinese, a point that was indirectly supported in August
1988 when
Brigadier General Lee Hsien Loong, the minister for trade
and
industry and son of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, urged
Chinese
newspapers to use simpler language to attract younger
readers. Some
academics questioned the restriction of Chinese values to
Confucianism and recalled that in the 1950s and early
1960s Chinese
was the language of radicalism and revolt rather than of
loyalty
and conservatism. The necessity of learning Mandarin to
conserve
traditional Chinese culture was not obvious to those
Chinese who
felt that Chinese culture had been transmitted for
centuries
through Hokkien, Teochiu, and Cantonese. They pointed out
that the
colloquial speech of modern Beijing (upon which Mandarin
is based)
was as distant from the classical Chinese of the Confucian
texts as
was colloquial Cantonese. Giving up the dialects implied a
major
transformation of the social structure of the Chinese
community,
because the associational and commercial structure of
Singapore's
Chinese-oriented society rested on (and reinforced)
dialect
distinctions.
Data as of December 1989
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