The trouble with Chinese language policies in Singapore

Recently, I joined the Facebook group "Heritage languages of Singapore", and was immediately directed to an online petition by a group called 'Creatives For Causes' to reintroduce Chinese dialects on local TV and radio programs in Singapore. Judging by the number of signatures (only 238 at the time of writing), it seems that either it's been poorly publicised, or people just don't agree with the need for these dialects.

[Note: I will be using the term 'dialect' in this post, even though linguists would consider Hokkien and Cantonese to be separate languages from Mandarin. In my experience, the term 'dialect' seems to be preferred in everyday speech because to most people, these languages exist mainly as spoken vernaculars and are not used in written texts.]

This call comes after over 30 years of aggressive Mandarin promotion by the Singapore government, which had earlier designated Mandarin as the 'official' Chinese language to be used as a means of uniting the various Chinese groups in Singapore. The reason why dialects have been banned, and continue to be banned stems from the belief that their use is detrimental to the learning of Mandarin. The people behind the petition argue that this belief is wrong, given linguistic research that shows that young people can in fact grow up multilingual. On a slightly different note, they argue that we need dialects to prevent the elderly Chinese population who may not speak or understand much Mandarin from becoming isolated, as younger generations of Singapore shift towards English and Mandarin.

I fully support the petition, and I urge others to support it as well. But my reasons go beyond what has been mentioned on the petition site. In particular, I would like to talk about the reasons why Mandarin was introduced as the official Chinese language, and then raise some of the issues with Lee Kuan Yew's reasons for stamping out the use of dialects. Some of these are mentioned in an interview published in the Sunday Times, 11 December 2011. You can find a copy of the article below.

"Out with dialects, in with Mandarin" Sunday Times (11/12/11)

Why Mandarin to begin with?

In 1959, "the Hokkien group was the largest, forming just over 40 per cent of the total ethnic Chinese population. The Teochew group was next with nearly 23 per cent, the Cantonese third with 18 per cent, and the Hainanese and Hakka groups followed with about 7 per cent each. Mandarin was spoken only by a few educated people, such as schoolteachers, journalists, writers and artists, who had come to Singapore to teach or work."

Although not explicitly stated in this article, the usual narrative is that Mandarin was chosen to unite the various dialect groups, as well as form a link with ancient Chinese culture and values (Wee, 2009). The fact that it was the national language of China would have also contributed to its choice. In more recent times, the reason for promoting Mandarin has become more about gaining access to business, educational and cultural opportunities in China (Teo 2005).

Looking at a speech by Lee in 1984, we can examine the notion he held that Mandarin is the sole linguistic conduit for the transmission of traditional Chinese values:

"It [Mandarin] reminds us that we are part of an ancient civilization with an unbroken history of over 5000 years. This is a deep and strong psychic force, one that gives confidence to a people to face up to and overcome great changes and challenges. To be able to speak Mandarin and read the Chinese script, is reassuring. To look at Chinese characters, to see them as mysterious hieroglyphics, is to be emotionally disadvantaged. A little effort and the magic of the characters will reveal itself. . .. Parents want . . . their children to retain traditional Chinese values in filial piety, loyalty, benevolence, and love. Through Mandarin, their children can emotionally identify themselves as part of an ancient civilization whose continuity was because it was founded on a tried and tested value system." (Lee, 1984, p. 3) (cited in Teo, 2005)

These statements are problematic, because they are based on the flawed notions that:
(a) Mandarin, as it is spoken today, has been the language of Chinese civilisation for over 5000 years; and
(b) that it is intrinsically linked with the Chinese writing system, to the exclusion of all other Chinese dialects.

Firstly, Middle Chinese (spoken around the Sui and Tang dynasties) did not sound like Mandarin. (And Ancient Chinese would have sounded even less like modern spoken Mandarin since it didn't even have tones.) We know this about Middle Chinese because of sources like the 切韵 / 切韻 Qieyun, a rime dictionary from the Sui Dynasty that described the contemporary pronunciation of Chinese characters by using a system that divided the first sound of a syllable (the initial) from the rest of it (the rime). It also provided rime tables, which grouped pronunciations of Chinese characters together by tone, initial and rime. Most of these groupings would not make sense if we relied on the modern Mandarin pronunciations of these characters. (Note that the name Qieyun itself is written in pinyin and only reflects the current Mandarin pronunciation, not the pronunciation at the time it was written.)

Secondly, it is a mistake to think that dialects like Hokkien and Teochew cannot be written using Chinese characters, and that the only way to access Chinese writing is through Mandarin. In 1883, a Presbyterian missionary named Adele Fielde published a Teochew-English dictionary, based on the dialect spoken in the city of Swatow. In that same year, another missionary, John Macgowan, published a Hokkien-English dictionary, based on the Amoy dialect. In both dictionaries, Chinese characters are used to write Teochew and Hokkien.

Click here for options to download Fielde's (1883) A pronouncing and defining dictionary of the Swatow dialect, arranged according to syllables and tones.
Click here for options to download Macgowan's (1883) English and Chinese dictionary of the Amoy dialect.

Language and Racialisation - the problem of the Singapore Mother Tongue

"Our ideal was that the Chinese would be able to speak English and Mandarin, Malays would be able to speak Malay and English, and Indians would be able to speak Tamil and English. Alas, the situation did not develop as we had hoped."

Underpinning this statement is the belief that Chinese people should have had little trouble learning Mandarin, on account of their Chinese-ness. This is supported by the use of the term 'mother tongue' in the Singapore context, to refer to the language associated with one's race (or designated race) - unlike most other countries in world, 'mother tongue' and 'first language' do not mean the same thing here.

Taking myself as an example, Mandarin was designated as my mother tongue. I have a Chinese surname and thus my race is 'Chinese'  in all official documents here. This ignores the linguistic realities of my home, where both my parents do not speak Mandarin (nor does my maternal grandmother). In fact, my parents are much more fluent in Malay, a language I was not allowed to study as a mother tongue (despite my Peranakan / Straits-born Chinese heritage which was not recognised by the government). Similarly, my forced inclusion into this world of 'Chinese-ness' mirrors the forced exclusion of ethnic Malays and Indians were until very recently were not given the choice to study Mandarin in school.

Certainly, there are some similarities in grammatical structure and pronunciation across Chinese dialects, which would enable say, a native Hokkien speaker to pick up Mandarin faster than a native Malay speaker, but it does not mean that the Hokkien speaker will pick up Mandarin automatically, as a child being born into a Mandarin-speaking environment will. In fact, for many dialect speakers it would have been almost like having to learn two foreign languages in school, since many of them would have almost no exposure to either English or Mandarin outside school. Their real mother tongue (the way the term is used around the world, and by UNESCO) would be their home dialect, not Mandarin.

Removing the familiar and bringing in the unfamiliar

Lee seems to have made a similar realisation, following the 1979 Goh Keng Swee Report, and his controversial conclusion is one that he holds until today.

"If our students were learning English and Mandarin in school, and also learning dialects at home, they were in reality learning three different tongues. Given that their exposure to dialects at home was longer than their exposure to English or Mandarin, it was not surprising that their command of dialects was stronger than their command of the latter two."

In view of this situation, Lee and Goh's solution was to eradicate the language that these students had had the most exposure to. This involved the ban on the use of dialects in local media. These dialects were viewed as an extra learning burden for speakers, who also had to learn English and Mandarin (Wee, 2009). Unlike the prestige languages English and Mandarin, dialects were seen to have little functional benefit.

Over the past few decades, a lot of work has demonstrated that with well-implemented bilingual programme, students with a good foundation in their home language / mother tongue (not the Singapore sense of the term) can actually progress further in a dominant national or foreign language than students who enter a program taught entirely in that dominant national or foreign language. For more information, you can look at the UNESCO site for Mother Tongue Multilingual Education which includes materials that advocate the promotion of the mother tongue. [EDIT: The main purpose of many of these programs is to bridge the gap between the home language and the national language, not to have students come out of school only fluent in their home language, which alone does not give access to jobs and further education.]

The rationale for this is: children first learn about the world around them through the language used at home. By the time they start going to school, they already know a lot about the physical and cultural world around them. A good primary education program uses what they already know and promotes cognitive development by building up from simple concepts to more complex ones - it guides the child into the unfamiliar by using the familiar. Naturally, such a program uses a language that the child already has some knowledge of, and requires curriculum planning, teaching material development and teacher training.

In a similar analogy to one raised by Lee, I sometimes ask my monolingual English friends in Australia to imagine what it would be like if they only had exposure to English at home, but went to school and discovered everything was taught in Russian - not only would they have to learn the Russian language, but they would also have to learn mathematical (and basic scientific) concepts in Russian at the same time. Some children may do well because their families can afford to give them more exposure to Russian, but these are children who do well in spite of the system. This is similar to the situation faced by many indigenous people around the world, who are forced to go to school where a national language that they may not have access to outside the classroom is used. In many cases, plunged in a completely alien language environment, they either learn to memorise what they need to in class, which they promptly forget when they leave school, or they simply drop out of school - scenarios not unlike what Lee encountered in Singapore in the 1970s.

Like in so many places in the world, spoken vernaculars in Singapore were (and are) seen as the 'burden' as opposed to prestige languages like English or Mandarin, despite the fact that the use of dialects could have been instrumental in easing the burden of learning English and Mandarin. The government may have also needed to compromise on the original expectations that all Chinese people become fluent in both English and Mandarin. Instead, what we have now is a significant section of the population that are viewed as speaking both English and Mandarin poorly.

But rather than lament policies that cannot be turned back, [EDIT: and I think it's too late to overhaul the education system], we should look at things that can be changed. In light of what's been discussed, it's time to realise that dialects are not the main cause for the poor standard of Mandarin here. There is very little reason why dialects should not return to TV and radio, apart from maybe some difficulty in finding energetic young hosts who are fluent in their respective dialect. It has been done in Taiwan, where in the last 10 years, a Hakka channel and even an indigenous channel have appeared on local cable television.

Back to the older generation

This brings me back to the main purpose of this post. I am not criticising the government's policies for the sake of it - I simply wish to point out flaws in the reasoning behind the language policies, because I believe that people are suffering because of them, and that a change to the policy will result in less suffering.

The petition site talks about why we should support this case for the sake of the elderly. However, apart from just providing entertainment and intellectual stimulation, the elderly have a right to information. If we really are a maturing democracy, how can we have citizens who do not have access to information about how their lives are run - citizens who have spent most, if not their entire lives here (and many of whom are actually older than the country itself)? Surely they have a right to know about things like the White Paper, or be kept up to date when the next big outbreak like SARS strikes. 

The sad irony is that the very language viewed as a means for cultural transmission is now the reason for the growing linguistic and cultural gap between many older and younger Chinese Singaporeans. Bringing back dialects would be a small but important step in rehabilitating this relationship.

References

Teo, Peter. (2005). "Mandarising Singapore: A critical analysis of slogans in Singapore’s ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign." Critical Discourse Studies 2(2). pp. 121–142.

Wee, Lionel. (2010). "‘Burdens’ and ‘handicaps’ in Singapore’s language policy: on the limits of language management." Lang Policy 9:97–114.

[Here's a related post I write back in 2010 when I started this blog: Diverse Languages, One Identity
My next post The persistence of Singapore English and Mandarin also discusses other language issues in Singapore.]

One language to unite them all?

To start the new year, I thought I'd focus on a very linguistic issue.

At the wedding I attended a few weeks ago, I had a long conversation with a guy who remained convinced that the Nagas needed both a common 'Naga' language, as well as their own unique script.

-What about Nagamese? People from all different tribes and language backgrounds already speak it.

-But it's not Naga. It's from Assamese.

He was right - the local lingua franca Nagamese is largely based on Assamese, with a fair bit of Hindi and Bengali vocabulary thrown in, and hardly any input from individual 'Naga' languages. But the suggestion that all Nagas needed a common 'Naga' language (and script to boot) seemed to me a tad ridiculous.

From a practical perspective, creating a 'new language' from scratch is a massive feat. Which languages do we draw from? And how much should the new language draw on each existing Naga language? 20% Angami, 20% Sumi, 20% Ao... ? Or should we choose a particular language / dialect and base our new language on that, the way Standard Mandarin was based to some extent on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, or Bahasa Indonesia was based on a dialect of Malay from Sumatra?

Then, how do we go about implementing the -for what of a better word- imposition of this new language on the inhabitants of the state? China managed to impose Mandarin across the country, while Indonesia did the same with Bahasa. Both required considerable resources and a concerted national effort. Nagaland currently has official and unofficial governments and corruption drains away most of the money being channelled into the state by the Government of India.

Also, how would people feel about having another language imposed on them? Most education is already conducted in English, with compulsory Hindi in most schools. Add that to the home language and Nagamese (if Nagamese isn't already the language of the home). Do we really need another language?


But hang on, we also need to create an indigenous script to accompany this new language too.

-What's wrong with the Latin alphabet?

-It's not ours. It can't represent the sounds of the languages here.

Well the Latin alphabet wasn't made to write English either. But somehow English, and other completely unrelated languages like Swahili and Bahasa Indonesia have managed to adopt the same script to represent their respective sounds. Letters can be added and removed, depending on the language's needs. The same letter may be used in two different writing systems to represent different sounds, like 'x' in English usually represents the sounds [ks], while 'x' in Sumi represents the voiceless velar fricative [x].

As with implementing a new language, introducing a new script would require considerable resources. But again, people already have to learn to read English (and Hindi) - do they really need another script to learn? Furthermore, it'll be used to write a language that no one currently speaks!


Looking at the bigger picture, what is the point of having a common 'Naga' language and a unique script? Undoubtedly, the perceived need for these is motivated largely by political and ideological factors, not practical ones. After all, having a common indigenous language is one way of asserting a 'Naga' identity, in contrast to an 'Indian' one. Similarly, an indigenous script is seen as necessary to being a 'real' language when viewed within a larger 'Indian' discourse, given that individual languages across the subcontinent like Bengali, Kannada and Tamil usually come with their own scripts. (European languages that use the Latin script aren't judged along this criterion though.)

This person I spoke to also believed that speaking one language would help unite the Nagas. There are people around the world who believe that if we all spoke one language, there would be less conflict. China and Indonesia had national language policies designed to create a sense of unity their respective countries.

But does speaking the same language reduce conflict? As important as language is in the creation of identity, it's still just one component - other differences may still arise within the same speech community.

For instance, one thing I've noticed is that there are very few dialectal differences in Sumi (with the exception of speakers from the Pughoboto area), so that people from across Zunheboto district as well as those in Dimapur and Kohima, are able to communicate with each other in Sumi. In contrast, Angami speakers from neighbouring villages sometimes have to converse with each other in Nagamese because they speak such different 'dialects' of Angami. I was told that this was the case for Angami speakers from Bara Bosti in Kohima when they meet people from nearby Jotsoma village.

But despite this 'linguistic unity' of the Sumis, it hasn't prevented the interfactional violence we've seen this past week around Zunheboto town between NSCN (K) and Unification.

So would one language unite all Nagas? I seriously doubt it.

Diverse Languages, One Identity

A few days ago I was wandering my favourite section at my favourite bookshop in Singapore - the languages section at Books Kinokuniya at Takashimaya. I came across a small booklet titled Diverse Languages, One Identity, "a joint initiative between the National Institute of Education (NIE) and the National Library Board.

As you can see, the booklet covers basic conversations in the four official languages of Singapore: English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil. The blurb on the back adds, "This booklet aims to create an awareness of the spoken mother tongue among students and teachers and serves as a good platform to build understanding and respect among the various races in Singapore."

Usually I'd be quick to dismiss any attempts by a national board to encourage a more 'cohesive' society (think 'Racial Harmony Day'), but given the focus on language, I thought I'd give it a second glance. The NIE news says the launch date for the booklet was back in April 2010, but judging from the stacks of copies on the shelf, I doubt it's been a bestseller.

For one thing, the price of $10.70 for a modest 64-page booklet (with pages smaller than your standard A5 size) seemed a little exorbitant. The only reason I can offer for the rather hefty price is the mini CD that comes with the package, given that no mention of said CD is found on the cover of the book. The distributors would have done better to have the words 'FREE CD INCLUDED' on the packaging.

Now, the fact that there is a CD included puts this booklet, in my mind, above any random Lonely Planet phrasebook marketed to travellers (who are often absolute beginners in a language). Sadly, though not surprisingly, this little booklet still suffers from a large number of shortcomings.

The introduction states that the booklet "is designed to develop basic inter-personal aural and oral skills in the three official mother tongues of Singapore with the objective of promoting inter-ethnic linguistic awareness and cross-cultural understanding." The book is divided topically (or rather by speech acts): Greetings, Making Introductions, Ordering Food, Making Apologies, Congratulating etc. English and Malay are written using their standard orthographies, while Chinese is transcribed using the romanised hanyu pinyin system (no characters are given), and Tamil with 'simplified and Romanised IPA notations" for reasons given in the introduction of the booklet. Each chapter contains a list of "useful phrases" (often just commonly used vocabulary) given in each language as well as a few "scenarios" consisting of 2-3 people speaking a total of 2-4 lines of dialogue. All phrases and scenarios have been recorded on the accompanying mini CD.

From a language learner's perspective, many of the phrases are not terribly helpful. Many of the initial dialogues are artificial and the English is clearly set at the wrong register (one I think of as 'formal post-colonial'), e.g. 'Hello, how's everything lately?', "I'm fine, it has been a while since we last met." There are more complex sentences, e.g. "I really did not expect to win it", but their translations are difficult to analyse morphologically (or word by word) without any prior knowledge of those languages, and it is unlikely any beginner would dare to use these sentences in real life with nothing else to continue a conversation in. Some of the recordings are also too fast for the untrained ear to pick up, especially with no explanation of the sounds represented by the various transcription systems used in the booklet.

Taking a step back and looking at the larger aims of the book, these are predicated on the rather outmoded concept of 'mother tongue' in Singapore, based not on one's 'first language' nor on what is spoken at home, but on one's race. (Ironically enough, it's one's family name, taken from the father, that is taken into consideration.) These are the three official languages taught as 'mother tongues' in school, with English as the 'first language'. Therefore, if you're Chinese (or just have a Chinese family name) you learn Mandarin in school as your 'mother tongue', if you're Malay you learn Malay and if you're Indian you learn Tamil. Never mind that your home language might not be any one of these three languages - even if you're Chinese it might be Hokkien or Cantonese that you speak at home. Furthermore, ethnic Malays and Indians who wish to learn Mandarin in school cannot take it as a 'mother tongue', though there are limited opportunities to study it.

It is therefore counter-intuitive to have an initiative designed to get people to understand each other's 'mother tongues', when the whole system is set up to divide people based on language categories that have been largely constructed. While I can see reasons in trying to preserve / construct / reconstruct distinct cultural identities through language, it makes little sense to then have to resort to initiatives like Diverse Languages to bridge them again.

This brings me to my next point. We already have a common language in Singapore, and it's Singlish. Whenever I see inter-ethnic groups of Singaporeans together, they're speaking Singlish. If you want to create a single 'Singaporean' identity that separates the 'locals' from all the 'expats' (and the rest of the world), we already have one with its own linguistic basis, and it doesn't even need to be taught in schools, or in booklets for that matter.