Abstract
Singapore is a small 633 sq. km (244 sq. mile) island state located at the tip of the Malay peninsula—in the heart of the Malay speaking world. With a population of 3,531, 600 it is a densely packed city-state, dependent on trade and the resources of its mainly Chinese background population (76.5%). Malays (15%) and Indians (6.5%) make up most of the rest of the population—although there are quite a number of others (2%) including Eurasians and guest workers from the region as well as from English speaking countries. Singapore is tolerant of religious diversity and these religious practices—Buddhism and Taoism (56%), Christianity (19%), Islam (15%), Hinduism (5%) and other (5%)—reinforce Singapore’s multilingual and multicultural society. (See Appendix A, Figure 12.)
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Notes
The Straits Settlements consisted of Singapore, Malacca and Penang (also see Chapter 7 on Malaysia). In some respects it is not possible to talk about separate policies for Singapore during this period.
Given the Eurocentric view of the state—the one language, one nation syndrome, and early tendencies of language planning to follow this view, national languages have often been conceived of as being polity based. Even English has its nationally based Englishes (see Kaplan and Baldauf 2001 for an American English example). However, as Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 319) point out, languages exist in an ecological relationship, both within a polity and across polities. Singapore provides a good example of this. That is, changing the status of a language(s) within a polity (e.g., Mandarin) has a major impact on the other languages spoken in that polity (e.g., the Chinese dialects), but also as neighbouring Indonesia and Malaysia have planned ‘Malay’, the Malay used in Singapore has been effected.
Pakir (1987) argues that Baba Malay is essentially a Malay dialect that has borrowed some Hokkien loan words in clearly delimited semantic and cultural domains—including terms of address, customs, gambling, household equipment, terms relating to business, value judgements and words of emotive import—but has retained Malay order of head-attributes in the hybridised forms. Pakir indicates there were perhaps 5000 Baba Malay speakers in Singapore and 5000 in Malacca at the time of her study. (Also see, Widdowson, 1979).
Although outsiders may mistakenly equate the two, Bazaar Malay, the reduced and relatively easy to learn pidgin should not be confused with Malay the community language, the language of status and Islam. In the late 1960s Baldauf found Bazaar Malay an invaluable tool for getting around in Singapore. Today English fills the same role.
In Singapore these are called ‘mother-tongues’. That usage is avoided in this chapter because it is linguistically inaccurate and confusing, but in Singapore it makes a very powerful political statement about the links between language and race and culture.
Evidence of the decline is summarised in Ang (1998) in Table 19.1. In 1950 72, 951 or 53 .28% of students were in Chinese medium schools and 49, 690 or 33.09% were in English medium schools. By 1955 the figures were 94, 244 or 44.61% and 97, 057 or 45.68% while by 1960 the figures were 147, 448 or 42.14% and 180, 275 or 51.05%. Thus, although numbers of students in Chinese medium schools doubled over the ten-year period, the proportion of students attending dropped by 11 per cent.
Gopinathan (1974: 30) indicates that in 1957 64 per cent of funding went to English medium schools, 24.1 per cent to Chinese Schools, 4.2 per cent to Malay schools and 0.3 per cent to Tamil schools.
It needs to be remembered that these events occurred during the cold war when there were fears about the spread of communism in Asia (e.g., the communist take over of China, the war in Korea, the Emergency in Malaya) and about Singapore becoming a third China.
This also solved the problem for the British of what do with these colonies, which were undeveloped (materially and educationally), unprepared for independence and under threat of annexation from Indonesia and the Philippines. What was not realised fully in Malaya at the time was that the majority of the indigenous inhabitants of Sabah and Sarawak were not ethnically Malays (except in Brunei which in the end did not join) nor were they Muslims. Many of these bumiputra (sons of the soil) were Christian or ‘pagan’—as the British had labelled them. While government primary schools were Malay-medium, the educated had to study in Chinese- or English-medium secondary schools and had little or no Malay language background or cultural orientation.
From Department of Statistics, Singapore 2000 figures cited in (Pakir in press) based on advanced data release (10 per cent sample).
By language ecology, we simply mean the interactions of a language(s) with its environment (see Haugen 2001/1972). In particular, as Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 269 have argued: Language planning is often perceived as some sort of monolithic activity, designed specifically to manage one particular kind of linguistic modification in a community at a particular moment in time. It has tended to assume the modification of one languageonly and has largely ignored the interaction of multiple languages in a community and multiple non-linguistic factors—that is, the total ecology of the linguistic environment. This practice may be a direct outgrowth of the one nation/one language fallacy. Wherever its origins he, it is not a productive way of looking at language planning. Rather, the language planning activity must be perceived as implicating a wide range of languages and of modifications occurring simultaneously over the mix of languages in the environment, some of which may constitute the motivation for an attempt at planned change while some may be dragged along willy-nilly as an outcome of an attempt at planned change in a given sector. Language planning must recognise as well that language modification may not be susceptible to containment within a particular nation-state or other entity that may be isolated for the purposes of discussion but which in truth always remains embedded in a larger context. Rather, the language plan may cause a ripple effect in proximate communities, nation-states, across a region (or in other smaller or larger entities). Mühlhäusler (1995) has examined the case of language planning and language ecology in the Pacific, particularly in relation to pidgins and creoles, and more generically in 2000. He notes that linguistic ecologies provide a ‘structured diversity’ in a particular area and that “the first manifestations of...linguistic imperialism is not the reduction of the quantity of indigenous languages but the destruction of the region’s linguistic ecology, a fact often overlooked by those who write about language decline” (1995: 77).
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Kaplan, R.B., Baldauf, R.B. (2003). Language Planning in Singapore. In: Language and Language-in-Education Planning in the Pacific Basin. Language Policy, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0145-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0145-7_8
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