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rfmcdonaldLanguage Log's Victor Mair took a look at the consequences of Singapore of the "Speak Mandarin Campaign,", a government push from 1979 inaugurated by then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on to encourage Singapore's speakers of different Chinese regional languages--and, by extension, Singapore's non-Chinese--to create a homogeneously Putonghua-speaking environment, with an integrated ethnic Chinese community that could support a stable bilingualism.
This fairly coercive policy, one news article suggests, didn't pay off.
Lee's Gender issues aside, briefly put it looks like in Singapore's language ecology the Speak Mandarin Campaign did successfully diminish the rate of inter-generational transfer of the various Chinese regional languages in Singapore and increase the rate of second-language knowledge of Mandarin, but--perhaps complicated by other language policies like the push for English-language fluency--helped encourage a broad language shift to English among younger generations through coercive policies. Are there similarities to Ireland's language policy, perhaps?
Within the short space of eight months, Singapore's founding Prime Minister and current Minister Mentor, Lee Kuan Yew, has done a nearly complete about-face in his attitude toward promoting the use of Mandarin in the republic. As late as March of this year, when he was celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the campaign to "Speak Mandarin," Lee was claiming that "In two generations, Mandarin will become our mother tongue.”
In those days, Lee was asserting that people have only so many “gigabytes” in their brains to devote to languages. Though admitting that speaking “dialects” in some situations can provide “extra warmth,” he warned that, by using such languages, “You are losing important neurons with data which should not be there. And like the computer, when you delete it, it doesn’t really go away. It’s there at the back, and you’ve got to go to the rubbish channel and say ‘destroy.’ And it’s still disturbing your hard disk.” (See this useful summary and detailed list of references by Mark Swofford.)
Thus, thoserubbish languages must be destroyed“dialects” must be let go, he intimated.
This fairly coercive policy, one news article suggests, didn't pay off.
Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said his insistence on bilingualism in the early years of education policy was "wrong". Instead it caused generations of students to be put off by the Chinese language.
Speaking first in Mandarin and then in English at the official opening of the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language on Tuesday, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew gave a blunt assessment of Singapore's bilingual policy.
He said: "We started the wrong way. We insisted on ting xie (listening), mo xie (dictation) - madness! We had teachers who were teaching in completely-Chinese schools. And they did not want to use any English to teach English-speaking children Chinese and that turned them off completely."
Mr Lee added: "At first I thought, you can master two languages. Maybe different intelligence, you master it at different levels."
But his conclusions now, after over 40 years of learning Mandarin, cannot be more different.
MM Lee said: "Nobody can master two languages at the same level. If (you think) you can, you're deceiving yourself. My daughter is a neurologist, and late in my life she told me language ability and intelligence are two different things.
"Girls are better at languages because their left side of the brain to learn languages, as a general rule, is better than the boys. Boys have great difficulty, and I had great difficulty.
"Successive generations of students paid a heavy price, because of my ignorance, by my insistence on bilingualism. And I wasn't helped by the ministry officials, because there were two groups - one English speaking, one Chinese teaching."
Lee's Gender issues aside, briefly put it looks like in Singapore's language ecology the Speak Mandarin Campaign did successfully diminish the rate of inter-generational transfer of the various Chinese regional languages in Singapore and increase the rate of second-language knowledge of Mandarin, but--perhaps complicated by other language policies like the push for English-language fluency--helped encourage a broad language shift to English among younger generations through coercive policies. Are there similarities to Ireland's language policy, perhaps?
