新加坡的华语 Xīnjiāpō de Huáyǔ — Chinese in Singapore

Four languages, one campaign, and what a policy did to a dialect

Singapore is around three quarters ethnically Chinese, and it has four official languages: English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. Malay is the national language for historical and regional reasons; English is the language of government, law, business and school instruction; and every child studies a mother-tongue language alongside it, which for Chinese Singaporeans means Mandarin. That bilingual policy, in place since the 1960s, has produced a population that is genuinely functional in two languages and often mixes them freely. The part relevant to this course is what happened to the other Chinese varieties. The Chinese population of Singapore came largely from Fujian and Guangdong, so the community languages were Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese — the 方言群 of lesson 89 — with Hokkien dominant. In 1979 the government launched the 讲华语运动, the Speak Mandarin Campaign, on the argument that a single Chinese language would unify the community and that children studying English plus Mandarin plus a home dialect were carrying too much. Dialect programming was removed from television and radio, campaign slogans urged people to speak Mandarin to their children, and the policy worked: within a generation Mandarin had replaced Hokkien as the common Chinese language of Singapore. It also worked in the way such policies do. Younger Singaporeans largely cannot speak the dialects their grandparents used, some families lost the ability to talk across generations, and there is now a well-documented body of regret about it — including from officials who ran the campaign. Dialect programming has been partially restored, there are heritage projects, and the arguments about whether the trade was worth it are had openly in the Singaporean press. That is the same argument as lesson 56's about 普通话 on the mainland and lesson 80's about Cantonese, conducted in a small country that documented what it did. For a learner there is a practical reward here. Singapore Mandarin is simplified-character and pinyin-based like the mainland's, so everything in this course transfers directly; the accent is mild; and English is available as a fallback in every transaction, which makes Singapore one of the least stressful places to try out Chinese. The features to expect are the particles, the code-switching, and a set of local nouns — plus the fact that a great many people will answer your Mandarin in English out of pure convenience, which is worth taking as a kindness rather than a judgement. And one thing worth carrying from these two lessons together. Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia: five centres, three names for the standard, two character sets, two romanisations, and one language that all of them understand. English is the closest analogy and it is not a bad one — nobody thinks Australian English is a corruption of British — but the Chinese case involves scripts as well as accents, which makes it larger.