I recently read about how bilingualism is failing in Singapore. The majority (around 60%) of young people can only speak English because their parents, most of whom are bilingual, only speak English at home. The monolingualization is worse for kids from otherwise would be Indian or Malay speaking families.
Part of the problem is of course English being given a prestige status in education, business, and government, but a major part of the problem is that the second language the Singaporean government wants people to speak is Mandarin, which is not the language that Chinese Singaporeans used to speak.
Here is a video of Lee Kuan Yew asking people, in Hokkien, to stop using Hokkien or Hakka in 1979. His logic is that people in Mauritius converse in Creole, and taught French and English at school, and in the end they speak all 3 terribly.
However, is that really a bad thing? The problem with Mauritius is that geographically it isn’t particularly well positioned for international trade, not that they had too many languages. Singapore was already doing relatively well in the 1980s, and most of them don’t speak RP or Mandarin particularly well, and it didn’t hurt them then.
Is Singapore headed for a monolingual society like Taiwan, and Taiwan’s so called bilingual roadmap sounds painfully similar to Singapore’s, how will it ever succeed when the “bilingual society” they are modelling after seems to be ephemeral.
Yeah, those would be interesting stats to look at. I almost always speak to Singaporean Chinese (and Malaysian Chinese) in Mandarin because listening to Singlish is just so damn grating.
That’s the other thing. Plenty of Chinese Singaporeans (and Chinese Malaysians) speak flawless English, but are most of them just kids from well to do families that could provide the additional language exposure required to get them to that level?
If bilingualism is really working like how Lee Huan Yew was promising in that video, everyone in Singapore should be speaking “standard English” and “standard Mandarin”, whatever those mean.
Or maybe that’s a thing of the past, and most people in their 20s these days speak excellent English but can only speak broken Mandarin and their Hokkien would be non-existent?
Well, I don’t know if I’d call it flawless, especially when it comes to accent, but the wealthy and highly educated do of course speak much better English.
I’m more exposed to middle-aged Singaporeans, but the younger Singaporean Chinese I have talked to were fine at conversational Mandarin…it was by no means broken.
Is there anywhere that has a bilingualism policy which expects and achieves 100% bilingual fluency?
Certainly Canada’s bilingualism isn’t 100%.
But, everyone has the choice. The education system more or less gives everyone the opportunity (imperfectly) to become bilingual. Plenty of people I went to school with did immersion in grade school (certain subjects taught in French), and kept taking French electives in high school (mandatory classes finished in Grade 9). They graduated with good enough French to get federal jobs without needing more training. Some of them use it
Every product had bilingual information, every federal government service is available bilingually (rural Yukon won’t have bilingual staff for every provincial service, but should have printed stuff and websites in both languages).
I see Taiwanese bilingualism failing largely because the government doesn’t seem to feel it applies to them, when it should apply to them first and foremost.
Based on this video, most people are much more comfortable speaking English. The girl at 2:20, and the dude at 3:12 are probably the only ones thatＩwould say have decent Mandarin skills.
The two girls that are pretty decent at 4:00 are Malaysian. The dude at 4:40 sounds like he’s straight up from China. The kid at 5:10 is frigging awesome if he is born and raised in Singapore.
It’s about time Singaporeans stopped speaking chinese dialects like Mandarin and started speaking the global prestige language of planet earth: English (aka standard indo-european)
The little kid at 5:10 took a while to process the question not because the question was in Mandarin, but because the interviewer’s Mandarin is terrible.
This is a youtuber from Hong Kong who spoke all 3 languages (Cantonese, Mando, English) perfectly, like the most posh a Hong Konger can get.
I time coded to an older man from a Cantonese family who went to a Chinese school growing up, and spoke the most amazing Taiwanese Late Immigrant accent I’ve ever heard a Singaporean do. He says he try to speak to his children in both English and Chinese. Most bilingual experts suggest one person be responsible for speaking just 1 language to the kids.
The Malaysian student immediately after that guy considers the Chinese curriculum in Singapore too easy.
It hasn’t worked out with your compatriotes in Louisiana at all. My cousins speak English with a very weird accent, but sadly, no Francais.
(Weirdly, I’ve had the experience with Frenchmen that they turn up their noses at my being an American, but as soon as I mention that my grandpa was a Cajun, they immediately become bosom compatriotes. Oh well, laissez les bons temps rouler)
