The Language Barrier Between Singaporeans

Singapore Has Almost Wiped Out Its Mother Tongues

Younger generations of Singaporeans, especially Chinese Singaporeans, are having a greater difficulty communicating with not only elderly people within their communities, but elderly people within their own families. Being that Singapore has stressed the teaching of English within schools since 1987 (to increase the country's "global competitive edge"), and the fact that the only secondary languages are either Mandarin, Malay or Tamil, this makes it extremely difficult for young people to speak with their elders, who, more often than not, do not speak these more standardized languages. This divide was primarily brought about by the “Speak Mandarin Campaign” of 1979, which sought to eliminate the Singaporean mother tongues of Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka (which came from Singaporean origins in the southern provinces of China). This campaign also brought about the erroneous belief that the Singaporean mother languages were nothing more than dialects that prevented a single Chinese identity from flourishing within the country, the government going as far as to publicly proclaim "To speak dialect with your child is to ruin his future". This thus brought about the dissolving of dialects within households by 78% in 1980, and even as current as 2015, with a 15% decrease in vernacular. The sheer extent to which English has been stressed as one of the national languages of Singapore is astounding, even beating out Mandarin, with "over 70% of households with children at primary school" using English as their primary language. Despite this overshadowing of the mother languages, recent sentiments have risen in support of them, even at a high political level, such as with current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who "claims to be proud of Singapore’s unique form of Mandarin". While his true feelings towards the mother languages could only be to emphasize a single Chinese identity, there seems to still remain a sort of sentimentality towards the languages. Recently, many younger Chinese Singaporeans have embraced the mother languages, taking classes to learn Hokkien, Hakka, and Cantonese to better communicate with their elderly family members.