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When the Local Confronts the Global in Language-in-Education Policies: The Case of Singapore

Quand le local rencontre le global dans les politiques linguistiques éducatives : le cas de Singapour
Gilles Forlot
p. 165-185

Résumés

Cette contribution examine comment les politiques linguistiques ont joué un rôle déterminant dans la construction de la nation postcoloniale de Singapour, en tant que leviers de la formation de l’identité ethnique dans le nouvel État et comme moyens d’inventer les dimensions à la fois globales et locales du pays. L’élaboration de ces politiques linguistiques est présentée en détail, et l’article se concentre également sur le relâchement progressif de l’approche autoritaire de l’État en matière de correction et d’utilisation des langues, tout en analysant comment les communautés locales de cette société mondialisée et axée sur l’économie tentent de saisir un sens du local par le biais de leurs pratiques langagières. Cette contribution se concentre sur les cas de l’anglais, du singlish et des langues chinoises et sur les rôles qu’ils ont joués dans la formation de l’identité nationale et communautaire à Singapour.

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Texte intégral

I am grateful to the Sorbonne Paris Cité Consortium and the National University of Singapore for co-financing two research grants (LASIPA 2015 and CoLaSeA 2017) which made part of this fiedwork possible. I am also indebted to the help and knowledge of my NUS colleague Daniel Kwang Guan Chan, with whom the initial stages of the fieldwork were carried out.

Introduction

1Ever since Singapore became a colony in 1819, the island has had to tackle its ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity. In this contribution, I will first argue that language policies, particularly language education ones, have constituted an essential part of Singapore’s postcolonial nation building, as an instrument of ethnic identity formation in the new state and a tool to invent both the global and the local dimensions of the country. After presenting the development of these language policies, I will then delve into the slow relaxing of the rules of language conducts, which I hypothetically relate to the passing of founding Prime minister Lee Kuan Yew in 2015 but more essentially to the fast-paced development of a very globalized, international economy-driven society.

  • 1 As they are officially termed in Singapore. They refer to languages such as Hokkien, Teochew, Canto (...)

2In terms of language education, I will examine the gradual loosening of an authoritarian approach to language correctness as well as of the racialist principles undergirding the country's language education, focusing on particular language cases and the roles they have played in communal identity formation in Singapore: Singlish and Chinese “dialects.”1 Besides the historical sections of this paper, which draw on scholarly work published in the past decades, the major parts of this article are based on some fieldwork carried out in Singapore from 2016 to 2019 and from 2022 to 2024. The data include 630 questionnaires collected between 2016 and 2017 as well as some 45 interviews led with university students, primary and secondary school teachers, college lecturers, community leaders and various other social actors involved in the local art and cultural scene or in business. For lack of space, I will restrict the interview excerpts to a minimum, but more data material can be found in Forlot (2018) and Forlot (2021).

Post-Independence Policies and the Fabric of History: Global Singapore

3Language policy can scarcely be dissociated from the socio-political fabric of a society. In the case of Singapore, a set of keywords, constituting the founding myths of the young republic, come to mind: neoliberalism, multiracialism, pragmatism and meritocracy (Hill & Lian 1995). The birth of the new nation was characterized by the establishment of an economic regime based on trade and economic liberalism. The success of the country, both economically and socially, is no longer to be demonstrated. But let us mention right now that Singapore is somewhat of an exception in high-income countries, insofar as liberal as it appeared, the state took control over most sectors of society, voicing its citizen-shaping commandments in the urban fabric (Goh 2015), supervising and managing all sectors of society from education to community life, from accommodation to public transportation, from grassroots associations to urban development, from family planning to ethnolinguistic policies. For instance, citizens were—and still are—officially identified as belonging to an ethnic category: Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Others (CMIO).

4I have little space here to go into sociohistorical details, but it should be mentioned that colonial management and post-independence planning procedures were both paradoxically very different and similar in nature. Turning its back to British colonial management and then to the Malaysian Federation, the new Singaporean state engineered forgetfulness, burrowing some parts of the earlier cultural history of the island, in particular its Malayan dimension, while highlighting others. But as Daniel P.S. Goh puts it, the state virtually suspended politics and by reorganizing urban settlements—via the construction of public housing (see also Chua 1997; Jain & Wee 2018)—“cleared the slate for a cultural tabula rasa for the production of a malleable modern life” (Goh 2015: 220). Despite its current global outlook, Goh argues, the Singaporean model of society is in fact that of a territorialized and colonial-like model (ibid.).

  • 2 The 2020 national census indicates that 74,3% of the city-state’s residents (i.e. citizens and non- (...)

5Built on the permanent quest for ethnic and linguistic balance, a policy of national multilingualism, maintaining the former racial divisions between the Chinese, the Malays and the Indians, was implemented.2 In addition to English which was already construed as the international language, the state opted for three other official languages corresponding, in a somewhat reductive and simplified way, to its three constituent Asian communities: Mandarin Chinese, the supposed heritage language of the Singaporean Chinese, Tamil, the language of the majority of Indians at the time of the settlement (but many other Indian languages, Dravidian or not, were spoken at the time of independence) and Malay, the language of the Malay people inhabiting the peninsula before the Chinese and the Indians settled on the island.

6The initial social engineering of the creation of the Singaporean state is thus inherited from several elements of its colonial history: British colonization had propped up and strengthened ethnic subdivisions by organizing the colony geographically and ethnically, and by encouraging the spread of local languages, reserving English for the ruling elite.

7Communal maintenance and vitality emerged in the very process of Singapore’s independence: the country had become independent because the local ruling People’s Action Party leadership could not accept the project of the Malaysian federal government’s Bumiputra policy (i.e. Malay ethnic preference at all stages of society). So as to alleviate inter-communal tensions, the newly independent state gave Malay the status of national language. To this day, Malay, a language little used outside Singapore’s Malay-speaking community, continues to serve as the symbolic language of the state: the national anthem and motto, military orders, solemn speeches, street signage, and national ceremonies are at least partially written or conducted in Malay.

8The first years of the young republic were then devoted to the building of a Singaporean identity cautiously engineered around each community’s ties with its ethnic affiliation, as ideologues of the ruling People’s Action Party feared a return to race riots and the fragmentation of the country into ethnic territories and dreaded the interventionism of some countries Singaporeans could trace their origins in (mostly China, India, and Malaysia—see Tan [2007: 77]). As expected in such a multicultural place, language policy quickly fulfilled its agenda as an instrument towards the manipulation of people, the languages they spoke and the way they communicated (Shohamy 2006).

Multiculturalism, Official Bilingualism and the Question of the Local

Bilingualism and Multiculturalism Policies

9Among the decisive elements in the birth of the Singaporean state was the notion of survival, and this may shed some light of Singapore’s relation to the local. Singapore depended both on its social and ethnic cohesion, but also on its economic development. The rationale of founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was the dual ideology of preserving what he conceived as the city-state’s ancestral Asian identity while securing its globalized development.

10The leaders of the Singaporean state then quickly made critical choices in terms of language education and use: (a) making English official and the language of mainstream education, as it was already the language of Western economic development, and (b) promoting Asian identity —or a certain type of it—in Singapore by making the learning at school of one of the three official languages other than English mandatory. As Rubdy puts it, Singapore’s educational system was “unabashedly harnessed in service of (its) capitalist interests” (Rubdy 2005: 55), and crucial to the success of this endeavour, the implementation of an English-knowing bilingualism (Pakir 1992) became the general rule.

11These educational measures, known as the Policy of bilingualism (1966) replaced the formal education scheme introduced in the late 1950s at the time of Singapore’s emancipation from the British colonial rule (Bolton & Ng 2014). Between 1970 and 1984, the Singaporean government gradually closed schools where the medium of instruction was not English, i.e. Malay, Chinese and Tamil schools. Under the pretext of declining attendance (Tan 2007), the move was in fact to generalize English as the language of schooling. English became officially institutionalized as a mandatory language at school in 1987.

12The evolution of these measures interestingly raises the issue of what exactly a local language is in Singapore, as these language-in-education measures resulted de facto in imposing English, the world language, as a local language onto its citizenry. Bolton and Ng (2014: 309) rightly point out how radical a change this was, inasmuch as English, faithful to the British colonial tradition, had until then been only the language of the administration. Vernacular idioms, often hybridized, such as Bazaar Malay and Singaporean Hokkien, served as inter-ethnic vehicular speech on a daily basis. Within the communities themselves, people spoke their “ethnic” languages and many had advanced skills in several extra/inter-community languages (Platt & Weber 1980; Chew 2013). English was then supposed to take on several socioeconomic functions, propelling Singapore into a growingly global economy: being taught to all school children, it was geared to enable the country to foster its development and participation in economic globalization. It was also perceived as a guarantee of balanced access to wealth and resources, since all citizens were now supposed to have access to it through basic primary and secondary education.

  • 3 This official figure is unlikely to include Bazaar Malay, a lingua franca used to carry out daily r (...)

13The radical change can also be demonstrated by the telling figures of the 1957 census: a few years before independence, only 1.8 per cent of the island’s inhabitants spoke English, while various forms of Malay were spoken by 48 per cent of the total population,3 including 32.5 per cent of the Chinese population and 88.3 per cent of the Indian population. The establishment of the bilingual policy consisted in finding a balance between ethnic/community languages and the non-ethnic one, English. On the other hand, the official local languages, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil, via their school promotion and the unavoidable standardization that comes with it, were implemented in the school system to assume the status of identity, ethnic, cultural and family languages, or more precisely, as the expression goes in Singapore, “mother tongues.”

14In those circumstances, it did not take long for English to replace Bazaar Malay as an interethnic language. English took on the role as the non-ethnicized, non-Asian language, the language of the residual “Others” category implemented in the racialist category divisions of the state (Lim, Pakir & Wee 2010: 6). Construed as a neutral language, therefore never as a potential “mother tongue” in the educational sense of the expression (Wee 2003), English was meant to foster both the internal cohesion of the country and partake in the emerging economic globalization where business was now conducted in English.

15This constitutes an interesting example of the glocalizing (Robertson 1995) tendencies and tensions of the Singaporean state: outwardly oriented, obsessed with its citizens being plugged into a neoliberal world, it could not free itself from English. At the same time, in order to assume its “asianness” and meet local reality and challenges, it had to implement a policy of educational bilingualism by imposing on everyone the learning of a language corresponding—more or less —to their ethnic descent. Alsagoff (2010; see also Rubdy & Alsagoff 2013) argues that the global-local dialectic—which she refers to as glocalization—that has underpinned Singapore’s language policies can be accounted for by the simultaneous co-existence of the local and the global in the creation of a balance where indigenization is the other side of the coin of the homogenization process, itself undermined by globalization (Robertson 1995).

Singapore’s Language and Prestige Planning: Shunning away from the Local

16Upon becoming an independent country, in its drive to sever the ties with its recent colonial history, the state opted for a reorganization of local language practices and ethnic distribution, initiating a sort of re-landscaping, as it were. After the bilingual policy evoked in the section above, two other campaigns were decisive in shaping language practices in Singapore and its citizens’ relationship to the local/global dynamics: the Speak Mandarin Campaign and the Speak Good English Movement.

17The following excerpt from a speech by former PM Lee Kuan Yew says it all:

Let me tell you what we did about Mandarin. Twenty five years ago, we decided that we would not speak a special Singapore Mandarin, pronounced with Hokkien, Teochew or Cantonese accents, and with Malay words thrown in. To set the standard, I had our announcers on radio and television and school teachers retrained by teachers from Taiwan who spoke standard Mandarin. We also hired a few announcers for TV and radio from Taiwan to set the pace. Because we used standard Mandarin on TV, radio, and with teachers in schools, we now have a generation of young Singaporeans able to speak more of a standard Mandarin. The Chinese-speaking world outside Singapore can understand us.

  • 4 Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, speech at the 34th National Day Celebration, August 14, 1999, Tanjong (...)

We must take the same approach with English. Get our teachers retrained. Do not popularise Singlish. Do not use Singlish in our TV sitcoms, except for humorous bits, and in a way that makes people want to speak standard English. We will see a difference in another one generation. The people who will benefit most are those who can only master one kind of English. Singlish is a handicap we must not wish on Singaporeans.4

The Speak Mandarin Campaign

18The Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched at the government’s instigation in 1979. Its aim was nothing less than to replace the statistically dominant Chinese languages (Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese, in particular) with Mandarin. The campaign was also a means to support the political measures taken to convert the Singapore Chinese population to standard Mandarin, which relied on the teaching of Chinese (Mandarin) at school as part of the compulsory “mother tongue” module for all Chinese Singaporeans. This led to the ban of radio and television broadcasting in any language other than Mandarin. Artistic and media creations in Chinese languages other than Mandarin were systematically dubbed, and local comedians were compelled to act in Mandarin rather in their Chinese dialects (Chan Y.K. 2014: 118).

  • 5 A few months before I started writing this article, Mr Lawrence Wong, Singapore’s fourth PM in its (...)
  • 6 Here is a more recent example: In the spring of 2024, an article in the online magazine Mothership (...)

19To this day, the Speak Mandarin Campaign is reactivated every year, with speeches and propaganda aimed at the abandonment of dialects and conversely the reinforcement of Mandarin. Prime Ministers from Lee Kuan Yew onwards5 have actively supported the campaign, attending promotional gatherings. Slogans such as “Start with Mandarin, not dialect,” “Speak more Mandarin and less dialects,” “Chinese is Mandarin,” “Mandarin’s in, dialect’s out” and, more recently, “Mandarin Cool!” have appeared on Chinese textbooks and posters aimed at the Chinese community. Founding Prime Minister Lee actively portrayed his own learning of Mandarin in various books (Lee K.Y. 2011), including Keeping My Mandarin Alive (Chua 2012), where the front and back covers show a diligent and studious leader. In his memoirs, he sets out his position on the place of Mandarin in Singapore, claiming that using Chinese dialects was not only an obstacle to the learning of Mandarin and English in schools, but that it would have not only replaced Mandarin but also strengthened the position of English (Lee K.Y. 2012: 150).6 Census figures consistently indicate a decline of Chinese languages other than Mandarin, and show the relative success of the Speak Mandarin Campaign in the gradual linguistic substitution experienced by the Chinese Singaporeans since the late 1970s.

20However, the conversion of the Chinese community to English as the dominant language and the decline of their Mandarin skills date back to Singapore’s entry into late modernity (Rampton 2006; Blackledge & Creese 2008; Heller & Duchêne 2011), firstly due to the development of technology, of increased mobility and, of course, of the policy of English as the language of schooling. Yet, the government’s focus on the balance between English and mother tongue skills has not enabled Mandarin to establish itself effectively as the language of Singapore’s Chinese community. This bilingualism remains essentially school-based, and many current studies show that the students’ proficiency in Chinese has not reached the level expected by the education system (Lee C. L. 2012). In fact, this is nothing new: back in 1979, the Ministry of Education set up a Higher Mother Tongue program. After a decade of bilingual school policy, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew foresaw himself the failure of this Mandarin bilingual policy (Chan 2017: 36-37).

21In 2004, a mother tongue B syllabus was launched by the Ministry of Education, with the aim of helping students with severe difficulties in their mother tongue. Henceforth, “mother tongue” syllabuses have been divided into 5 levels designed to cover all the skills of Singapore’s ethnolinguistic communities (Chan 2017). In line with the results of official censuses, most of the respondents in my corpus acknowledge their rather limited command of the “mother tongue,” i.e. admit to possessing a rather unbalanced bilingualism. The results of our survey of 630 university students (Forlot & Chan 2017) show that 85.9% of respondents indicate English as the language in which they are most proficient.

  • 7 From a language pedagogy point of view, see Shang, Chin & Chan (2015), who analyze the ways specifi (...)

22Another feature worth mentioning here is the fact that immigration in the past decades led to the settlement of Chinese born from Mainland China in Singapore. According to the 2020 census, 4,2% of the—resident—Chinese population in Singapore was born in Mainland China, and these residents brought with them not only their slightly different version of Mandarin (Kuo & Chan 2016), but also their language skills perceived as higher than that of local-born Chinese. This raises the hypothesis of an increasingly fragile connection between Chineseness and Singaporeanness (Ang 2017; Wong & Tan 2017a & b; Forlot 2021) and the role of Mandarin language education in this evolution.7

23The results presented in a study by Tan Y.-Y. (2014) also indicate a majority of respondent choose English as a dominant language, but at a much lower level (average 53.5% among young people; N = 436). But Tan also shows in her study that young Chinese Singaporeans overwhelmingly report using English to tell a story (89.1% vs. 9.2% for Mandarin) and to keep a diary (97.4% in English vs. 2.6% in Mandarin). This clearly indicates that young Singaporeans are literate in English. Let us turn to the question of the local once again.

The Speak Good English Movement

24As in many places of colonization, local forms of the colonial language developed, and the emergence of localized forms of Singaporean English can be traced back to the beginning of the period of official colonization (1867), when elite bilingualism also emerged (Schneider 2007). Repeated language contact created hybridities in all the island’s languages, and the creolized form of Malay, called Bazaar Malay, serving as a pre-colonial and colonial lingua franca, was gradually eplaced by Singaporean English, a nativized form of settler English (Chew 2013). This Colloquial Singapore English has been extensively studied and is widely known as Singlish.

25In the debate on English and Singlish, Alsagoff (2010) suggested an interpretation highlighting the importance of the global-local dynamic. For her, the questions go beyond mere linguistic matters and should be raised in cultural terms: English fulfils two functions, firstly that of the language of business, communication, science and technology, in sum that of accessing the global. At the same time, however, English was also construed by the founders as an inter-community language. Alsagoff (2007: 34-38) then argues that variations on Singaporean English stem from a conflict between the need to be local and the necessity to be global.

26Hence the possibility to consider various forms of English: a global form, heavily and systematically championed by the state, and a local form of language, allowing Singaporeans to do much more than communicate: Singlish is also their way to boast a linguistic uniqueness, it is the semiotic vehicle of Singapore’s identity. It has thus given rise to ambiguous discourses: often criticized, it was never ignored by the leaders, reaching a form of recognition by Singapore’s leaders as a language in its own right by the very fact of their referring to it as Singlish!

27A campaign to promote “correct English,” called the Speak Good English Movement, was launched in 2000. This linguistic “rectification” campaign is reactivated annually through public meetings and ministerial speeches, websites and an online platform. Some of this campaign’s slogans act as corrective echoes of practices frequently heard in Singapore. The 2006 slogan is remarkable in this respect: “Be Understood. Not only in Singapore, Malaysia or Batam.” The call for English intelligibility beyond Singapore’s immediate borders—Batam is the closest Indonesian island to Singapore, located just an hour’s ferry ride from the city-state —is a classic feature of Singaporean language policy, stemming from its constant concern for economic relevance and performance.

28Despite general agreement on the existence of Singlish, the Singaporean government still unsurprisingly prefers, through its statistics department, not to include it among the languages spoken in the city-state. Some recent studies have delved deeper into the census questions by asking their respondents which languages are spoken, to whom and in what circumstances (e.g. Vaish, Jamaludeen & Roslan 2006; Cavallaro & Serwe 2010; Siemund, Schutz & Schweinberger 2014; Leimgruber, Siemund & Terrassa 2018). The following table expounds some results showing the place of languages in the daily lives of our respondents (who could, logically, tick more than one box, as practices and repertoires are known to be multilingual). For the sake of simplicity, I only mention the figures that concern our Chinese respondents.

Table 1. Language(s) spoken in the family (expressed as a percentage; N = 630)

In English In Singlish In Mandarin In other Chinese lgs
To my father I speak/spoke 73 47 58 34
To my mother I speak/spoke 73 48 69 40
My father speaks/spoke to me 69 44 58 52
My mother speaks/spoke to me 68 45 70 63
Between brothers and sisters, we speak 71 45 41 9
At family gatherings, we speak 70 51 72 89
Among friends, we speak 89 58 60 11

Sources: Forlot & Chan (2017); Forlot (2018).

  • 8 Impressive if compared to the 37,6% of the older generation (Ages 50-80) providing the same answer (...)

29This table shows several things that the official censuses do not. Firstly, it confirms that together, English and Singlish are the dominant media of communication among peers. Of course, this also confirms the unsolved mystery of the separation—if any—between the two variants of English, the standard one and the more or less colloquial one. These figures are in line with those that can be found in other scholarly work, for instance in a 2012 questionnaire-based corpus collected by Tan Y.-Y. (2014): among the young generation (ages 18 to 29) of three ethnic groups, an average 53,5% of her 436 respondents indicated that English was their most proficient language, and an impressive 62,4% mentioned English as the main language of the household (ibid. : 331-333).8

30As for the use of Singlish, our corpus also provides two other interesting pieces of information: 52% of our 630 respondents agree (versus 18% who disagree and 29% who have no opinion) that Singlish is the true language that symbolizes the people and history of Singapore. When presented with the assertion that Singlish is a distorted form of English, incorrect English—as the Speak Good English Movement has been tirelessly trying to make them believe since the 2000s—59% disagreed, 17% agreed, while 24% had no opinion. I hypothesize here that for these students, linguistic questions, particularly those concerning Chinese “dialects” and Singlish, are controversial and call for a certain caution, which could explain the high rate of neutral/non-responses to these questions.

  • 9 See section “Singlish, the School Outcast” below.

31In line with the above, there remain a few contradictions in these positionings: while a large majority believe that Singaporeans are quite capable of learning and speaking both English and Singlish (72% agree, against 12% disagree and 17% fail to reply), more of them paradoxically claim that speaking Singlish can be an obstacle to learning error-free English. One can only speculate here: apart from the possibility that certain questions may have raised interpretation problems, we can assume that these contradictions reflect the—recent—double discourse of the state itself: Singlish is now presented as the local language of Singaporeans, needed for social integration and Singaporean cohesive life,9 but it is also singled out as the source of linguistic errors in learning standard, “international” English.

32What remains certain at this point is that Singlish, be it seen as a language or just as a colloquial form of speech, is still not looked upon as teachable material (Tupas 2018). It is rather a discursive practice that indexes Singaporeanness, both mobilized by social actors to show complicity or engage in local humor and often instrumentalized by the state to enhance localness and social cohesion. The following excerpt of an interview with Kin Meng provides a good illustration of the status of Singlish as a local language, yet strongly associated with informal language practices only acceptable in certain circumstances:

As in for me, I happened to see one Caucasian last time. He was speaking in Singlish all the time and talking very loudly over the phone. Then my mum was like, “hey, look, how come the Caucasian is speaking like that?” But once he hung up on the phone, he spoke to the wife and the kids in very fluent English so that my mum could barely understand also. (Kin Meng, 2nd year university student, 2016.)

33Wee (2018) reminds us that Singlish lovers and champions are more often than not those who have a good command of standard English, and that conversely those who speak little English and interact mostly in Singlish face all sorts of obstacles in their access to the economic resources essential to professional and financial survival in a country where the standard of life is very high.

34At the beginning of the 2000s, and despite former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s inflexible stance on the necessity to learn “proper” English and standard Mandarin (in the case of the Chinese community), the state seems to have grown aware of the importance of local language practices in the daily lives of Singaporeans, in the role they have played in the social model developed over five decades, as well as in the citizens’ ownership of their own Singaporeanness.

35Some signs of a shift away from radical positions on the issue of language learning and practice seem to be looming up. In the interviews I carried out between 2016 and 2019, there remained some uncertainty on the role of the 2015 death of founding PM Lee Kuan Yew in the gradual loosening of language-related rules. With time passing (i.e. from 2016 to 2024), I have noticed than more respondents tend to agree with this hypothesis. In the following section, I take a close look at those signs of the re-invention of the local in Singapore’s management of language issues, in particular in the area of education (both formal and informal).

A Turn-of-the-Century Shift: Reconsidering the Local in Language Issues?

Singlish, the School Outcast

36In the case of Singlish, there have been timid steps from the state, but also mostly controversies (Wee 2018) to acknowledge the relevance of Singlish in Singaporeans’ lives. From the 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s, the state was actively producing discourses identifying Singlish as a lingua non grata (Wee 2018: 41). Yet, those years were precisely quite fertile in cultural resistance, with TV shows and other film productions featuring characters interacting either in Chinese “dialects” or in colloquial local English. Two shows, for example, became very popular (Phua Chu Kan Pte Ltd and Under One Roof). The main trademark of these TV dramas, in addition to situational comedy, is the various forms of Singlish spoken by many of their main characters. As expected, these shows took on the role of satires or critiques of official discourse on the way the government imposed language correctness (Wee 2018).

37A case in point could be the two films directed by Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh, Talking Cock (2000) and Singapore Dreaming (2006). The latter, for instance, features characters from the typical local working classes speaking various languages, including Hokkien, Cantonese and Singlish. The film attracted international attention, winning international prizes, despite the fact that the Singapore audiovisual authorities had rated it R (restricted) and that they had banned the TV broadcasting of its trailers, thus hoping to make its release less attractive to the public in Singapore.

  • 10 In order to protect the identity of the interviewee, I chose not to indicate the person’s gender.

38In a 2023 interview, a member of the production team of Singapore Dreaming elaborates on the early life of the movie, in particular its promotion in Singapore. He/she10 explains to me that the authorities justified to rate the movie R by the fact that some of the dialogues (and its trailers) contained swearwords or supposedly offensive expressions, but her/his contention is in fact that it is language diversity at play, representing real daily Singapore life, that disturbed the censors:

Interviewer: It [the film] was rated R or something.

Interviewee: Yeah, they wanted a higher rating, and the censor, he seemed very embarrassed when he told me this, but he said, we’re afraid that even though you have bleeped them [the swearwords] out, the audience will be able to lip-read, and I said, if they can lip-read, that means they already know what the offending word is, in which case, I have not influenced them at all. You know, they acknowledged that, they subtly acknowledged that their reasoning didn’t hold any water, so they, eventually what happened at the censors is, actually they wanted to cut one entire scene and retain the higher rating, the raise on the language. After my appeal, it was a 1-0, they allowed the scene not to be cut, but I lost it on the language thing. (A member of the production team, Singapore Dreaming interview, September 2023.)

39In recent years, the Speak Good English Movement campaign has gradually shifted away from a coarse dichotomy between good and bad speech, emphasizing the idea that international English is important for economic life and therefore for the country’s economic future. This points to the gradual re-scaling of Singlish (Forlot 2021): from being a local, family language, disparaged by the state for many years, it has become a major Singapore-wide communal language, the language of togetherness, alongside the other more traditional linguistic pillars of the national narrative.

40Singlish has also been commodified as a cultural and commercial object: it can be found in souvenir stores, with local words, expressions, and particles (“lah”, “leh”, “lor”, “meh”, etc.) printed on objects such as T-shirts, diaries, mugs, etc. (Forlot 2018). The circulation of these cultural objects and productions not only promote the language, but also place it at the heart of Singaporean identity (Kong 1999; Wee 2018).

41From a language of insiders’ bonding and complicity between Singaporeans themselves, Singlish has gradually become a symbol of Singapore’s local identity identifiable from the outside. Foreigners and tourists are quicky made aware that Singlish—whatever form it takes—is not only one of the languages spoken in Singapore, but that it is the major language shared by all Singaporeans and only by them.

42The government has grown well aware of all this. While maintaining its support for “correct” standard English and for the purist ideology that surrounds it, it does recognize that Singlish exists and is a strong cultural attribute of Singaporean identity, recognizable from the outside (Lim 2015; Wee 2018). Ministers themselves sometimes resort to Singlish publicly (Wee 2018), and in a 2012 speech at a naturalization ceremony for Singaporean residents, former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong even admitted that social integration also required a knowledge of Singlish (Forlot 2018):

  • 11 In the transcription of PM Lee’s speech, the word Singlish is indicated between quotation marks, si (...)

Becoming a citizen is a big step. But it’s one step along a journey. I hope that now you have become a citizen, you will integrate even more closely into our society. Those of you who have been here some years, some ten, twenty, some maybe even thirty years—that’s not a problem. But those of you who have come more recently, I hope you will make the effort. Don’t just mix amongst yourselves, or with people who have come from the same country as you, but make friends with Singaporeans—with your neighbours, with your colleagues, with your children’s schoolmates, and pick up Singaporean customs, lifestyles, norms, social rules. And if you can understand “Singlish”, so much the better!11 (Lee Hsien Loong, Ang Mo Kio GRC and Sengkang West SMC Citizenship Ceremony, July 7, 2012.)

43In the educational sphere, there is on the other hand little debate over whether Singlish should or should not be included in school curricula. The widespread feeling is that Singlish remains a risk for the learning of Standard English (Rubdy 2005), and although pupils’ knowledge and skills in Singlish could be resorted to as a strategic tool for the learning and reinforcement of standard English skills, the local education system has not yet grasped the opportunity of creating this kind of additive bidialectalism by introducing Singlish in the classroom (Tupas 2018).

44Though Singlish is undoubtedly considered as the emblematic local language of all Singaporeans nowadays, both in Singapore itself and outside its borders, it remains rather invisible in the educational field, even if some learning material exists, such as books, dictionaries or glossaries, or online videos.

The Demise of Chinese Languages: An Unfinished Business?

45I have already developed in some details the fate of Singapore’s Chinese dialects—as they are referred to in Singapore—in the previous section. What I mentioned earlier would lead one to think that the death of Chinese languages other than standard Mandarin is near. Nevertheless, among the city-state’s dominant Chinese population, dialects have not entirely disappeared despite the radical shift from Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew or Hakka (and others) to Mandarin over a two-generation period.

46Oddly enough, while disparaged and discouraged for a few decades, Chinese languages have regularly re-emerged in different circumstances, in particular because the state have constantly resorted to them in the media (Lim 2015) to communicate with the elderly during election campaigns, during health crises (SARS and Covid-19) and when the health plans for the retired pioneer generation were reformed in 2015. At the beginning of the 2000s, in what looked like a paradox, the state decided to resort to Chinese dialects in its communication campaigns with the elderly, slowly loosening the ban and the stifling of those languages and thus opening the door for their re-legitimizing by the younger generation and for counter-discourses on the Mandarin-only policy (Tan S. 2012; Ng 2017; Forlot 2021).

  • 12 All names have been changed. In some transcribed excerpts, there is no clear distinction between th (...)

47In 2016 and 2024, I interviewed Mark,12 a language instructor in one of Singapore's universities. Mark, summarizes below what he has recently witnessed in the way Chinese languages have resurfaced:

Covid has a thing to play really in a way that because when the Covid hits, they need to disseminate information. So, if you go online, you will see ministers speaking in Cantonese about the importance of vaccination. And you will see actors speaking Hokkien. These are from Mediacorp, which is the official place, using Hokkien to tell people to stay one meter or to wash your hands, safety measure, social responsibility. So, that pushes the need to use, well, I was told not to call dialects a dialect. I was told by a teacher to call it a language. (Mark, university instructor, July 2024.)

48Beyond this state-controlled instrumentalization, a number of non-mainstream—i.e. not promoted by the Ministry of Education—teaching materials have been produced over the years by various interest groups. Though the only Chinese language one hears and studies at school is indeed Mandarin, the largest Chinese community languages have been resurfacing, and there is a growing public drive to learn them, via websites, radio programmes, and even university courses or private companies.

49I will briefly analyze two examples to illustrate the survival of Chinese dialects. Neither of these two initiatives has been engineered by the state, however. The first one is a grassroots Hokkien and Cantonese language programme established by one of Singapore’s universities, and the second one features a private company which has specialized in the teaching of Chinese dialects.

Who Wants to Learn Hokkien and Cantonese at University in Singapore?

50Mark—the above-cited university instructor—was informed a few years ago that his university board had decided to allow the students to ask for the creation of temporary courses of their choices, and that some of them would be implemented on a yearly basis. In 2020, Hokkien was selected, and a year after Cantonese also received numerous requests.

51Fluent in both languages, Mark started with Hokkien online—during the Covid-19 pandemic—and finally retained Cantonese (the language of his family), which he still teaches these days. In the excerpt below, underlining twice the fact that this project was “a bottom-up thing,” Mark explains how the Hokkien and Cantonese classes were created, and taught with the help of volunteering students.

[The students] wanted to learn. They realized there’s a need. And they’re also independent people who put things on Facebook and say “I read this book about Hokkien” […] So, for my Hokkien, I just thought—now I’m just teaching Cantonese —this one was initiated during 2020 by the Provost, there’s this opportunity for students to request for a module to be taught where you can’t find it in the regular modules at university]. So, it’s a bottom-up thing. So, it started in 2020 down there at the coffee store. One of my Malay students, who’s a Chinese, said, “I wish I could learn Hokkien.” Then I said “I can speak Hokkien.” Then he said, “can we create a…” At that time, we had to go online. At the time, it wasn’t, it was before the circuit breaker, which was in April 2020. So, we were talking about it in January. […] I said, “let’s start.” So, we created the course, it’s like, just by word of mouth. There’s no channel you can do. So, he just tells people, “there’s this person who can teach Hokkien. Do you want?” Then he becomes the leader. Then we have 10 people. Then we start bottom-up, and we applied. And I have, and by right, he should come up, and I’m just supervising. But I come up with the whole curriculum. […] By week four, we have to go online. Because someone in Jurong who was learning Hokkien karaoke, surprisingly there in Jurong Community Centre, they learn Hokkien songs. […] So, from there, we move online. But from that class, straight away, we can see how liberated the student came from the very first class. They no longer come as a student. They come as students. And they start chatting non-stop in that environment. (Mark, university instructor, 2024.)

52This drive to maintain the major Chinese dialects at university had actually been identified by another one of my interviewees, Rose, herself an instructor in a different university from Mark’s, a few years before the Covid-19 pandemic (2016):

Rose: And so there are more and more Singaporeans, I think, who have revived the use of Hokkien. So, again, it’s interesting. It’s the mathematics department that has a large number of Hokkien and Teochew speakers. And it’s a language that they’re very, very proud to use.

Interviewer: Among students or among…?

Rose: Among themselves, among students and staff, you know, they will banter in Hokkien. So if I come in, I know a group of them and they’ll be speaking in Hokkien and on purpose. It’s just to say, you know, this is the in-group and we’re going to speak that, yeah. And, you know, and I think there were enough wealthy families who spoke Hokkien and Teochew, for example. Clans, large families with money. And that sort of helped the languages kind of remain and not die out.

53As shown earlier, census statistics inform us of the extent to which Chinese dialects have lost ground in the past half century, overtaken by official and state sponsored Mandarin. Yet, the preceding testimonies not only show the motivation to preserve them, but also the real vitality they seem to have, including in educated circles. What we learn here as well is how social networks and the internet have played an increasing role in their re-development.

Marketing Dialects Learning: Identity, Protection, Communication

54It is rather uncommon to read about the teaching of Chinese dialects in Singapore, since the pressure from the state to conceal them and replace them by Mandarin was very strong from independence to the beginning of the 2000s. As this article claims, this pressure seems to be loosening, and Chinese dialects now tend to be seen as one of the key attributes of local heritage rather than a hindrance to the learning of Mandarin and English (see Lee K.Y. 2012, mentioned above). Currently, one of the leaders in the teaching of dialects is a company called LearnDialect.sg, founded in 2018.

55Implicitly and inconspicuously critical of the government’s past measures in language policy,13 in particular the Speak Mandarin Campaign, the company now boasts a very complete offer on its website, Facebook website and other popular social networks such as Instagram. LearnDialect aims at revitalizing the three major Chinese languages initially spoken in Singapore—Hokkien, Cantonese and Teochew. The rationale is that if one wants to get a grasp of recent Singapore society, one has to listen and talk to the elders, who are much more comfortable telling their life stories in their own (Chinese) languages. As the front page of their Facebook page questions, “Grandparents tell the best stories. Are you missing out because you don’t speak their language? LearnDialect.sg”.14

56The proposal to claim back one’s linguistic heritage typically echoes what William, a student in his twenties said during our encounter in 2017:

Well, I think the thing about Mandarin, I guess, the way I understand how it came about to be such a dominant language was purely coincidental with... Well, not coincidental, but it had to do with the way politics was playing out in China then, and with how the political system is structured here, the kind of ties that we want to keep with the mainland, it seems as though policies have been enacted such that most people, if they were to be ethnically identified with the Chinese, would probably speak a language that would help them politically, economically gel with the mainlanders. So, I think that kind of came at the expense of many of the other dialects that... Like, I can barely speak to my grandmother because she only knows Cantonese, for example. (William, 3rd year university student, 2017.)

57Initially online, LearnDialect.sg classes can now be taken either in person and online. Mainstream sessions last 6 x 90 minutes, and are charged a little over 200 Singaporean dollars. Their “What our Students Say” webpage emphasizes the entertaining and open-to-all aspect of the company’s programme, as well as its conversational dimension: not only does it enable one to speak with grand-parents, but also with taxi drivers and hawker centre employees (street food vendors, affectionately called “uncles” and “aunties” in Singapore). In its “Why learn a dialect” website tab,15 the company also mentions the relevance for some professionals, such as social workers, volunteers with elderly people, police officers and people in the healthcare profession, of taking dialect classes, precisely because they are very likely to serve the dialect-speaking population.

58The commercial arguments of LearnDialect.sg aptly call for people’s soul-searching trajectories and social conscience. The message identifies those who are the most socially and linguistically fragile, as well as those who care for them: grandparents or great uncles and aunts, the people who feed others, those who help them in their daily lives, etc. In saying this, the message of the company is not only that learning a Chinese dialect is a way to safeguard one’s family identity and roots, but also a means to protect the most vulnerable of Singapore’s local society, that is those who have not embarked in the city-state’s globalized late modernity, either because they are too old, or because they are regarded as socially peripheral or marginalized.

59The company actually attempts to play on both sides of the coin: while trying to prompt the nostalgic reaction people usually have when they witness their local culture fade away, it simultaneously highlights the international nature of some of these languages, mainly because they are languages of China. The most obvious case is that of Cantonese and its association with the much-appreciated culture of Hong Kong, as illustrated in the following excerpt from their website:

Lеаrn Dіаlесt tо Вrоаdеn Yоur Ноrіzоn Оvеrѕеаѕ

Lеаrn Dіаlесt fоr Wоrk

Ноng Коng’ѕ аn іmроrtаnt fіnаnсіаl hub fоr Аѕіа, аnd оftеn, а tор сhоісе fоr јоb rеlосаtіоn fоr bаnkеrѕ аnd lаwуеrѕ. Іf уоu wоuld lіkе tо wоrk іn Ноng Коng, ѕреаkіng Саntоnеѕе wоuld рrоvіdе уоu wіth а grеаt соmреtіtіvе аdvаntаgе. То bеgіn wіth, уоu саn соmmunісаtе fluеntlу wіth уоur ѕесrеtаrу аnd соllеаguеѕ. Yоu саn аlѕо mаkе lосаl frіеndѕ еаѕіlу, іmmеrѕе уоurѕеlf іn Саntоnеѕе сulturе аnd аdарt tо thе fоrеіgn соuntrу fаѕtеr. Тhе ѕаmе аррlіеѕ tо рісkіng uр Ноkkіеn іf уоu аrе ѕееkіng а јоb іn Таіwаn’ѕ mаnufасturіng аnd іnduѕtrіаl ѕесtоrѕ. Nоw, wоuldn’t уоu lіkе tо lеаrn dіаlесt tо hаvе mоrе саrееr сhоісеѕ?

Lеаrn Dіаlесt fоr Тrаvеl

Аrе уоu аn аvіd trаvеlеr? Ноw dо уоu lіkе thе fееlіng оf bеіng unаblе tо ѕреаk thе lосаl lаnguаgе іn а fоrеіgn соuntrу? Наvе уоu fоund уоurѕеlf іn ѕіtuаtіоnѕ whеrе уоu wеrе unаblе tо аѕk fоr dіrесtіоnѕ, оrdеrеd thе wrоng fооd, оr bеіng rірреd оff? Тhе оnlу thіng уоu соuld dо іѕ tо gіvе а wеаk еmbаrrаѕѕеd ѕmіlе аnd fееl ѕtuріd. Nоw, whаt іf уоu саn ѕреаk а lаnguаgе thаt ѕоmеоnе саn undеrѕtаnd?

Тhеrе аrе аrоund 60 mіllіоn Саntоnеѕе ѕреаkеrѕ іn thе wоrld. Веѕіdеѕ Ноng Коng, Масаu аnd Маlауѕіа, dіd уоu knоw thеrе аrе аt lеаѕt 565,000 Саnаdіаn rеѕіdеntѕ whо rероrtеd Саntоnеѕе аѕ thеіr nаtіvе lаnguаgе? Тhеrе аrе аlѕо аn еѕtіmаtеd 15 mіllіоn Теосhеw реорlе іn thе wоrld, іnсludіng Тhаіlаnd, Саmbоdіа аnd Lаоѕ. Fоr ехаmрlе, іn Ваngkоk, Теосhеw іѕ ѕtіll ѕроkеn аmоng thе оldеr еthnіс Сhіnеѕе Тhаі сіtіzеnѕ!

Lеаrn dіаlесt nоw. Yоu’ll nеvеr knоw whо уоu wіll mееt іn уоur trаvеlѕ. Тhе соmmоn lаnguаgе wіll hеlр tо mаkе thе ехреrіеnсе ѕо muсh mоrе mеmоrаblе. Yоu fоѕtеr nеw frіеndѕhірѕ, ехсhаngе сulturеѕ, аnd ореn уоur еуеѕ tо frеѕh реrѕресtіvеѕ оf thе wоrld!a

a. Source: URL: https://www.learndialect.sg/​why-learn-dialect-singapore/​, accessed September 4, 2024.

60Let us remember as well that in Singapore, all Chinese languages have to a certain extent been both instrumentalized and commodified in the past decades. For instance, resistance discourses (Tan 2012) claim that it is those languages that provide social actors with a real sense of Singaporean identity and family roots. Note as well that in the preceding excerpt, the rationale in favour of the learning of Chinese dialects is formulated with the similar argumentative rhetoric as that of the state: dialects are useful for social cohesion, for job purposes, and for international affairs!

61Furthermore, because those discourses play on the strings of both the local and the global, they commodify dialects as marketable goods, or measurable goods and skills (Heller 2010). What we see here is a complex situation where language assumes a variety of different positions in Singapore society, and this is valid for Chinese dialects as well. The business-driven arguments of LearnDialect.sg are actually well identified by young Singaporeans, as Mark, our interviewee who has been teaching Hokkien and Cantonese to university students, expressed in the following except, identifying five reasons and motivations Singaporeans could have in learning Hokkien or Cantonese:

The terms I’m teaching to him [a student of his] is useful because he’s doing pharmaceutical, and he needs to translate the pharmaceutical terms so that it benefits the Cantonese speakers who are buying the drugs, who are using the drugs. So, the pharmacy has to educate the user at the using end. […] The first reason is “I can get a Cantonese girlfriend.” The second reason is “I can enjoy my Cantonese drama.” The third reason is “I can travel to Hong Kong.” But, apart from this kind of heuristic reason, there’s medical reason, the nurse find it useful. So, they can ask the patient, “do you have fever in Cantonese?” So, for the clinical aspect of the… Or in elderly homes here, there are people who speak dialects. (Mark, university instructor, July 2024.)

62The testimonies gathered here, as well the explicit objectives of LearnDialect.sg all point to the perceived situation and status of Chinese dialects in Singapore these days and the fact that they are seldom considered as “useless”: those languages, constantly labeled as dialects by the Singapore authorities in their quest to substitute them for Mandarin, are indexed as local, authentic Singapore languages—they were the languages most pioneers of the republic spoke—, still in use among the elderly, thus embodying family and traditions, that is to say some of the fundamental Asian values championed by founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew himself.

63What William and Mark had to say above echoes Ng’s study (2017) showing the general defiance towards the Speak Mandarin campaign initial objectives to eliminate Chinese dialects. Ng’s respondents list five reasons why people oppose the eradication of dialects: communicating with the older generation, sustaining grassroots organizations, communicating with one’s (grand-)parents, facilitating the learning of Mandarin, transmitting local Chinese cultural values and preventing the weakening of each Chinese group’s specific cultural identities (Ng 2017: 55-58). What this fieldwork constantly shows—as Mark expresses very clearly—is that young Singaporeans also perceive that those local languages have an international potential as along Mandarin, they are spoken elsewhere in the Chinese world—Hong Kong and much of the Chinese diaspora for Cantonese, and Taiwan for Hokkien.

64Finally, with regard to the media suppression of Chinese languages, let us note that more flexibility was introduced at the beginning of the past decade, with radio programmes in Cantonese or Hokkien being regularly broadcast, for instance on Capital 95.8 FM (interviewee Mark, personal communication). The shifting of ideologies has given rise to an indexical field (Eckert 2008) in which languages of all statuses in Singapore, be they official of not, are gaining new perceived associations, indexing their learning, their broadcasting or their use as relevant nowadays, despite the state’s past derogatory campaigns aimed at dampening their vitality and family transmission.

Conclusion

  • 17 One of the signs of the rising flexibility of the Singaporean state in recognizing diversity and lo (...)

65In this text, I have tried to capture the evolution of Singapore’s language planning, with a focus on mainstream and unconventional educational settings. Between the 1990s and the 2000s, Singapore witnessed a significant influx of migrants, gradually changing the ethnic —and therefore linguistic—texture of the city-state, as well as creating a challenge for the local language ideologies and the historically dominant discourses about the ethnic composition of the city-state (Rubdy & MacKay 2013). This has led to governmental measures to reflect upon this new and changing reality (Lim 2010). While the city-state of Singapore has emerged as the epitome of the global city, boasting its internationally educated, multilingual citizens, the urban fabric of the country, heavily intertwined with its social and material reality, contributed the creation of a citizenry whose links with its regional history were nevertheless somehow discontinued and reinvented from scratch upon independence. Singaporeans have been thrust into globalization as early as the 1970s by an omnipresent and omnipotent state and its commandment in all areas of daily life and conduct (Goh 2015; Liew 2015), including their ethnic affiliations,17 the languages they should learn at school and the way they should talk.

66Several researchers have underlined the shortcomings of these policies and the misgivings they have generated. Wee (2013), in a critical assessment of the country’s language policies, stressed the need to adapt the latter so as to address the increasing and evolving experience and diversity of Singapore’s population. By and large, in the investigations I have led in Singapore, respondents generally dither when it comes to assessing language policy and planning in Singapore. Thankful for the overall success of Singapore as one of the richest countries in Asia, they also acknowledge that it came with a price, for instance that of an oversimplification and homogenization of ethnic groups, which in turn took a toll on their private family and community lives.

67Entering into the third millennium, coming of age (Lim 2015) and now reaching its sixtieth anniversary, Singapore has had to ask itself questions related to its evolving ethnolinguistic landscape, about languages, their use and management. These questions have cut across all strata of society, from the state to the ordinary citizen, and in this society that claims to be plural and multicultural, sociolinguistic dynamics are a constituent part of political action. The ongoing changes in the involvement of citizens, in particular in its decreasing acceptance of past language policies, indexes what Guespin and Marcellesi (1986) termed “glottopolitics,” that is to say the way all strata of society—i.e. state, politicians and the citizenry—are, in different ways and at possibly different times, engaged in forms of language policy, even unwittingly.

68Singapore’s stunning entry into late modernity and its neoliberal economic model has called into question its traditional top-down language planning. In a process of renewal, citizens are participating in the redefinition of the language policies of its state (Brooks & Wee 2014) which, despite its still authoritarian tendencies, is not only receptive to change, but also shows some degree of tolerance for language practices that it once stigmatized. Taking the latter on board and intrumentalizing them allows the state to carry on with the production of Singapore’s national narrative. What indeed remains to be explored is whether the state’s reception to the changes observed here go beyond the mere ideology of instrumentalism (Wee 2003), and whether all this can be analyzed as independent from the very socio-political terms set by the state.

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1 As they are officially termed in Singapore. They refer to languages such as Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese or Hakka.

2 The 2020 national census indicates that 74,3% of the city-state’s residents (i.e. citizens and non-citizens) are Chinese, 13,5% are Malays and 9% are Indians. Another 3,2% are categorized as “Others,” which includes all those not in the other three categories, including the 18,000 Singapore “Eurasians.”

3 This official figure is unlikely to include Bazaar Malay, a lingua franca used to carry out daily routine activities (such as shopping, as its name indicates) and widely shared by all Singaporeans at that time.

4 Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, speech at the 34th National Day Celebration, August 14, 1999, Tanjong Pagar Community Club. Source: URL : https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/1999081404.htm, accessed on February 10, 2021.

5 A few months before I started writing this article, Mr Lawrence Wong, Singapore’s fourth PM in its 59 years as an independent country, took office in May 2024.

6 Here is a more recent example: In the spring of 2024, an article in the online magazine Mothership portrayed the new Prime Minister Wong’s efforts to reinforce his Mandarin and Malay proficiency: “Wong said he’s been taking Mandarin lessons in the past one or two years, along with weekly lessons to improve his grasp on Malay” (URL: https://mothership.sg/2024/05/lawrence-wong-struggled-mandarin-all-life/, May 14, 2024, accessed July 12, 2024.

7 From a language pedagogy point of view, see Shang, Chin & Chan (2015), who analyze the ways specific traits of local Singaporean Mandarin are treated as errors in Chinese language classes in Singapore.

8 Impressive if compared to the 37,6% of the older generation (Ages 50-80) providing the same answer (Tan Y.-Y. 2014: 333).

9 See section “Singlish, the School Outcast” below.

10 In order to protect the identity of the interviewee, I chose not to indicate the person’s gender.

11 In the transcription of PM Lee’s speech, the word Singlish is indicated between quotation marks, signaling as it were its unofficial use by the government. Source: URL: http://www.pmo.gov.sg/newsroom/speech-prime-minister-lee-hsien-loong-ang-mo-kio-grc-and- sengkangwest-smc-citizenship, accessed July 20, 2017.

12 All names have been changed. In some transcribed excerpts, there is no clear distinction between the past and present tenses, the latter being sometimes used to refer to past events. Transcriptions have been slightly amended, for instance with punctuation marks, so as to make them more legible to the reader.

13 One of the webpages reads as follows: “In Singapore, with English as the main language and the 1979 Speak Mandarin Campaign, dialects are, unfortunately, dying languages”, URL: https://www.learndialect.sg/why-learn-dialect-singapore/, accessed September 2, 2024.

14 URL: https://www.facebook.com/learndialect/, accessed September 2, 2024.

15 URL : https://www.learndialect.sg/why-learn-dialect-singapore/, accessed September 2, 2024.

17 One of the signs of the rising flexibility of the Singaporean state in recognizing diversity and local reality is the 2010 decision to allow citizens to bear a double-barrelled race affiliation (eg. Chinese-Caucasian or Caucasian-Malay) on their identification documents. The Immigration and Checkpoint Authority gives the following information on its website: “A child’s race can follow either parent’s race or an acceptable hybrid race. A Singapore citizen may also choose a double-barrelled race (i.e. comprising both parents’ races).” Source: URL : https://www.ica.gov.sg/documents/identity-cards/change-of-race, accessed September 6, 2024.

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Référence papier

Gilles Forlot, « When the Local Confronts the Global in Language-in-Education Policies: The Case of Singapore »Moussons, 45 | 2025, 165-185.

Référence électronique

Gilles Forlot, « When the Local Confronts the Global in Language-in-Education Policies: The Case of Singapore »Moussons [En ligne], 45 | 2025, mis en ligne le 04 juin 2025, consulté le 16 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/moussons/12741 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/147jt

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Auteur

Gilles Forlot

UMR CNRS 8202 SeDyL, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco), Paris

Gilles Forlot is a professor of sociolinguistics and language education at Inalco University, in Paris. Before joining Inalco in 2024, he was a research associate at the Franco-Ontarian Centre at OISE/University of Toronto, a Postdoc researcher at the University of Louvain (Belgium) and an associate professor at the University of Picardy in Amiens. He holds a PhD in sociolinguistics from the University of Louvain and a Habilitation from the University of Rennes 2. After spending more than a decade investigating language practices and policies in Canada, in Belgium and in Northern France, his current research interests focus on the place of languages in Singapore’s nation-building as well as on the spread of English in educational settings.

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