speak good english lah
So after many many years of me ranting about the standard of English in Singapore to people who don't really care, it's finally become a National Issue. (Not my ranting, the English.) How do I know it's become a National Issue? Not because it's been hogging the headlines, or because a Minister has spoken on it, but because it's been accorded podcast status on the admirably imaginative mr brown show - which is now apparently sponsored by yearbook.com.sg, Singapore's latest pathetic attempt at emulating the success of other people.
I haven't been reading the papers for some time, but what I gather is there's been some concern over the awful language we pass off as English here. I can't quite confirm this because although that's what the articles appear to be talking about and what the Ministry of Education's latest measures - such as hiring "native" English speakers - appear to be implying, no one has actually come out to say so. In fact, everyone seems to be going out of their way to avoid saying it.
Take associate professor David Deterding from the National Institute of Education's English Language and Literature department for example. He apparently believes English standards have not fallen in Singapore, a claim he justifies with this completely bizarre statement:
"In the past, the few people who spoke English spoke it well because they mostly went to elite schools. Today, nearly everyone speaks English. It is inevitable that the overall standard is lower, because the majority do not go to elite schools. It is not logical to compare the standard of a small elite with that of a whole population."
The thing is, I kind of understand what he's saying, even though I think it's excruciatingly phrased. Standards of English have not fallen over time - they're just incomparably bad right here and right now.
But is that any surprise, given our language policy? Having forced native Hokkien/Teochew/Cantonese speakers to speak two foreign tongues - English and Mandarin - in schools since 1966 and having attempted to eradicate the everyday use of dialects, the government now seems illogically surprised at how no one appears to be able to speak any language well. (I'm leaving out Malays and Indians because there were fewer issues of identity/dialect there and also because I'm lazy.)
According to a paper I did last year and a lifetime ago, of the ethnic Chinese community in Singapore, Hokkien speakers have always been the predominant group. At the time of self-government, in 1957, Hokkien speakers accounted for 40.6 percent of the Chinese population in Singapore, compared to 22.5 percent Teochew speakers, 18.9 percent Cantonese speakers, and 14.9 percent speakers of Hainanese, Hakka, and other dialects. By 1970, the Hokkien community was the only one to have grown in proportion (to 42.4 percent, significantly larger than the Teochew and Cantonese speakers at 22.4 percent and 17 percent respectively).
To the linguist the mother tongue is "a language first learned by the speaker as a child." In this sense, Mandarin was never the mother tongue for any substantial portion of the population. In 1957, only 0.1 percent of Singapore Chinese claimed Mandarin as their mother tongue, whereas 30 percent claimed Hokkien, 17 percent Teochew, and 15.1 percent Cantonese as their mother tongues respectively.
Even in 1978, by which time the government's language policies had had sufficient opportunity to take effect, more people could understand Hokkien than any other Chinese dialect: 77.9 percent of the population claimed to understand Hokkien, 63.9 percent Mandarin, 63.2 percent Cantonese, and 59.7 percent Teochew. And in fact, also in 1978, a report on the Ministry of Education's policies "acknowledged that since 85 percent of Singaporean Chinese came from dialect-speaking homes, Mandarin had been wrongly dubbed as the mother tongue of the Chinese!" But "rather than leading to a reevaluation of the measures that were designed to homogenise the Chinese in the first place, this realisation led to intensified efforts to valorise Mandarin."
The official reasons given for the government's insistence on Mandarin for the whole Chinese community regardless of dialect group had, like every other official justification in Singapore, socioeconomic roots - i.e. the importance of China and China's own language policy, as well as the need to maintain the community's self-identification within a cultural context.
But there was also another reason. Bilingualism was implemented partly to categorise the numerous disparate ethnic groups into three superficially and artificially distinct racial types and to construct and impose a supra-ethnic national identity onto these races. Mandarin, then, was used to coalesce those categorised as Chinese and to foist upon them a factitious and unnatural uniformity through linguistic standardisation.
With people speaking different languages at home and in school and across generations, it's not difficult to picture how Singlish evolved. The rise of Singlish has been attributed to the need to fill the vernacular gap left by the eradication of Chinese dialects; and its widespread use has, perhaps more than any other factor, indicated the failure of compulsory bilingual education in the attempt to replace dialects with Mandarin.
Ironically - given that one of the objects of bilingualism was to replace clannish ties with a state-centric affinity - Singlish has come into its own as the strongest symbol of national identity among Singaporean youths today. An informal poll of 750 National University of Singapore undergraduates conducted in 2004 asked respondents what they considered to be "uniquely Singaporean" (ah, our favourite STB term). The most popular response was Singlish, followed by local food. Singlish has also inspired an amazing amount of linguistic research.
I don't know if Singaporeans would speak better English if they hadn't had to learn a mother tongue alongside it in addition to the dialect they were presumably already speaking at home. But I consider language to be one of Singapore's more spectacular domestic policy failures and it amuses me to see these damage control measures being taken now, when even people who speak good English - like me (or so I like to think) - take inordinate pride in saying "lah".
Although it would be really good for my blood pressure if people who can't string together a grammatical conversation in English stayed far far away from me.
posted by zyn ::
10:35 PM ::
7 Comments ::
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