Recollections

Scene One: An 80 yr-old granny walks into the clinic alone…

Me: Ah Mah! Hoe bor? Simi see? (Hey gramps! What’s up?)

Granny: Lo-kun ah… Wa tao tia, lon-zhong tia… Sum bo lat… (Oh Doc, I have a headache and I’m aching all over… feeling tired…)

Me: Er, jiog gu liao? (Er, for how long [have you been feeling unwell]?)

Granny: Neng jit liao. (It’s been two days.)

Me: Wu fa-sio? Tor? Dti jio? Huit gweh? (Any fever, vomiting, diabetes, high blood pressure?)

Granny: Bor bor bor, wa hoe-hoe. (No no no, I’m fine.)

And that’s about all the conversation I am able to have with her. I do not know enough Hokkien to explore her ailments in detail, and certainly not enough to find out if there are any family or social problems contributing to her symptoms. The next few minutes pass in silence as I perform a brief physical examination, write a few notes, then usher her to the waiting area to wait for her meds.

Scene Two: The professor and a group of medical students stand around the bed of an elderly male inpatient. Prof starts his clinical teaching session.

Prof: I want one of you to talk to this patient and take a good history. [turns to patient] Ah Pek, ler si Hokkien nang eh si Teochew nang? (Uncle, are you Hokkien or Teochew?)

Patient: Wah ah Tew-chiew… (I’m Teochew.)

Prof: [looks at me] Auw, that’s your name, right? This is your day! Proceed.

Me: [sheepish] Sorry Prof, I don’t know how to speak Teochew…

At which point the Prof’s upbeat countenance is replaced with a death stare. There are no words for the depths of his disappointment. The teaching session veers completely off-tangent into a sermon about the crucial importance of being able to communicate in dialect with patients who can’t speak anything else, for what feels like an hour. I swear to myself never to attend another tutorial by this professor, and think of quitting medical school.

Reversal

It was ironic that I received criticism instead of praise for being the very product the government had so desired.

I was born in the year the Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched. Many Chinese kids of my generation still grew up around grandparents who spoke only in dialect, giving them ample exposure and opportunities to achieve a usable degree of fluency.

Unlike them, I grew up with Cantonese-speaking grandparents that included a Grandma who could actually speak to me in English because she had attended school – until World War II happened. Grandpa also spoke Shanghainese but I never got to hear it since Grandma did most of the talking for the both of them. I ended up learning to understand Cantonese but not how to speak it. My siblings, all of whom are younger, had fewer chances to interact with them, and have picked up even less dialect than I have.

According to census, in 1957, only about 2% of the resident Chinese in Singapore spoke either Mandarin or English as their predominant household language. Inversely, this meant that the majority spoke either dialect or Malay (for Peranakans) instead. By 2010, the ratio had flipped, with 80% now using either Mandarin or English primarily for communication at home.

Reasons

It would be convenient for this dramatic language shift to be attributed entirely to the actions of the government. First, the policy of bilingual education in 1966 designated Mandarin as the only official mother tongue for Chinese Singaporeans. This was expected to have the added benefit of uniting the local Chinese who were divided by dialect at the time.

Next, in 1979, upon concerns that the learning of Mandarin in school was being hindered by the speaking of dialect at home and everywhere else, the Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC) was rolled out to promote Mandarin as a common language among the Chinese, and to discourage the use of the so-called “Chinese Variants”. Later, with the rise of China as an economic power in the 1990’s, the government would highlight the commercial value of knowing Mandarin as a further reason for the campaign to carry on.

However, would the dialects have continued to flourish anyway in the absence of government manipulation? Perhaps the decline of dialects has been inevitable in a country where the official language for teaching, trade and administration is English. In the end, perhaps it was not Mandarin that drove out the dialects. We imbibe the language we live in, and as we became increasingly comfortable not just speaking but even thinking in English in school, at work and at home, naturally less time was spent on the practice of other tongues, including Mandarin, let alone her linguistic cousins.

Ramifications

Whatever the factors, the aftermath was the near-extinction of dialects in one generation, and a tragic language barrier between the young and the old. The government may not have been fully responsible, but it certainly accelerated a process that might have gradually happened over a few generations instead.

The inaugural slogan of the SMC was “Speak More Mandarin, Speak Less Dialects”. Intended or not, the campaign forever stigmatised the speaking of dialects. I remember my parents speaking comfortably with each other in Cantonese, only to hesitate and switch to English when they wanted to include me in the conversation. I remember our weekly dinner outings with our grandparents, where I was afraid to hazard some Cantonese with Grandpa lest I incurred the disapproval of the other diners, or worse – got caught by the government!

Nowhere was this alienation of our elderly more apparent than in the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) crisis of 2003. Accepting the reality that knowledge of dialects amongst the general population was now so sparse, that they could not depend on word-of-mouth alone for the message of SARS prevention to reach the old, the government finally lifted a two-decade ban on the broadcast of dialect programmes on national radio and TV.

Reform

In this author’s opinion, the SMC has outlived its relevance – if it was ever justifiable in the first place – and persists only so that certain public agencies get to keep their funding. If unification was the goal, the language that has united a diverse people, and that serves as our true lingua franca, is English. When I speak with my Singaporean Chinese friends and colleagues, we do not converse in Mandarin, but in English. In the bus, on the MRT, at the malls, I do not see our local-born Chinese students chatting in Mandarin, but in English.

In a multilingual nation, the campaign runs the risk of being almost discriminatory in nature. It asserts that Mandarin is the only “correct” mother tongue for anyone of Chinese descent, and implies that all other variants are unacceptable. Cantonese remains the majority tongue in Hong Kong, likewise for Hokkien in Taiwan. And though the national media channels employed to run the campaign had multiracial readership, such as The Straits Times which published a daily Mandarin vocabulary lesson, it was clear that the Chinese were being singled out for special attention. Why were there no equivalent Speak Malay or Speak Tamil campaigns? In fact, why wasn’t it simply a Speak Mother Tongue campaign?

The longer the SMC goes on, the more contrived it becomes. Rather than a celebration of the cultural and economic richness of Mandarin, the campaign is a reminder of the priceless heritage we’ve lost. How do you put a price on a language? The local versions of the dialects are unique to Singapore, with words borrowed from each other as well as loan words from English and Malay.

When do I speak in Mandarin? To our Singaporean elders, our Malaysian friends, and overseas workers from China. Mandarin is economically useful – it does connect us with the wider global Chinese community. It is worth having a basic knowledge of it, and those motivated to go even further and master it should be encouraged to do so. But the encouragement should not have been done by denigrating the dialects.
To the government’s credit, the more recent incarnations of the campaign no longer attempt to work in some potshots at the dialects.

Perhaps they have realised their error. Perhaps SARS happened. But I say enough is enough. Stop the Speak Mandarin Campaign altogether.

Stop it now.