Language Planning and Policy: A Case Study of Dialects in Singapore - a Web Project for EL3267B

Micro effects
Home
Introduction
Background of Teochew & Hokkien
The Beginning of the End
Macro effects
Micro effects
SMC impacts Teochew & Hokkien!
What type of planning?
Other W-H questions
A possibility for revitalisation?
Some useful data
Some survey results
Conclusion
List of works referenced
Post-script: Phua Chu Kang
A Tribute: My Grandparents

Micro (Individual) Effects of the SMC using two examples 

Kenny:

"In my family, the main language we speak at home is Hokkien. My parents communicate in Hokkien, and I converse with them in Hokkien as well. However, my sister speaks to my parents in Mandarin; she is the only one in my family who does so. She tries to steal a bit of Hokkien in though..."

In a schematic presentation, the lines of communication within my family would probably look something like the diagram below:

kenny.jpg

The only individual in the family who speaks Mandarin (predominantly) is my sister, and we can argue that this is an effect of the SMC. Upon her enrolment into a primary school in 1991, the SMC was already in full-swing, having garnered a ten-year history. A few indicators of how the SMC has affected her individual choice of language are:

1)      She listens to Mandarin popular music, and the number one-rated Chinese radio station, Yes 93.3 FM.

2) She reads Lian He Zao Bao, the largest circulating local Mandarin newspaper. 

3) She spends a disproportionate amount of her television time watching Chinese-medium programmes on Mandarin channels, namely, Channel 8 and Channel U.

Having taken these factors into consideration, one can see that the marginalization impact of the SMC on dialects is indeed tremendous. However, while it may affect language choice on an individual level, in the case of my family, it did not affect our language choice on a group level (since three-quarters of my family still speak Hokkien).

The SMC may not, in some examples of anomaly, bring about a change in language choice on an individual level. The fact that my parents are not in the least affected, or even feel the need to change their lingua franca from Hokkien to Mandarin, is a salient example. In addition, my personal preference is to speak in English in most contexts and Hokkien at home. I find that I cannot bring myself to speak to my parents in any other language because it would be too weird; it has to be Hokkien and nothing else. However, one must note that outside of our family, we do engage with others (such as strangers, or when my friends visit me and speak with my parents) in Mandarin, for the sake of communication and even social cohesion. In this sense, there is perhaps an unconscious subscription to the ideologies of the SMC occurring simultaneously with our conscious resistance and reluctance to embrace it in entirety.

 

Melvin:

"My family consists of my parents, sister and grandmother. Other than to my grandmother whom we speak Teochew to, my family converses solely in English."

melvin.jpg

The diagram above sums up how the members of my family communicate linguistically.

In essence, English is the means of communication between my parents, my sister and I.

My sister and I also communicate with relatives of my parents generation using English.

Theoretically, although my parents could communicate with us using Teochew, this is not practiced. One of the reasons for this is because my sister and I only have a rudimentary grasp of the Teochew language and cannot express ourselves adequately in it. In fact, I now speak to my grandmother in a hybrid of Teochew and Hokkien and find it hard to distinguish between the  nuances of these two similar languages. In my family, Teochew serves as a linguistic bridge between my grandmother (and members of her generation) and the next two generations (my parents and both my sister and me).

The SMC appears to have little effect on my family. However, the message of the SMC has been successfully conveyed to them. Although my parents do not speak Mandarin, they have made sure that my sister and I receive additional Mandarin lessons apart from regular Mandarin lessons in school.

However, I am still more comfortable speaking in English and do not speak Mandarin at all unless the other party does not understand or speak English well. In my case, the SMC does not influence language choice. Rather, my choice of English is influenced by my lack of proficiency in both Mandarin and Teochew.

We can see the effectiveness of the SMC through some other examples.

For instance, many parents heeded the Government's call for them to register their children's name in Hanyu Pinyin form. Our generation reflects this in some degree. From August 1982 to July 1984, 20.84% of parents registered their chidren's surname and name in full Hanyu Pinyin, 35.55% registered their chidren's surname and name in dialect with full Hanyu Pinyin in bracket, 23.01% registered their chidren's surname in dialect with name in Hanyu Pinyin while only 20.6% registered their children's name solely in dialect (Lee, 1989; 42). This pinyinisation of names is reflected in our generation in one form or another (see names in our survey marked with asterisks).

Many young people find themselves unable to articulate more than perfunctory greetings in dialect. They are experiencing rapid attrition of their dialects, due to the usage of English and Mandarin as a "Language of Wider Communication" (Fishman, in Bokhurst-Heng, 1998; 29) to replace terms which used to be solely communicable in dialects.

As shown by the above two examples and the general results of our mini-survey, the trend of our generation (young twenty-somethings) not being able to communicate in dialect is a prevalent one. Here, we take effective communication to entail the ability to both comprehend and articulate the dialect. 

It seems that we belong to some sort of intermediate generation, neither being fully proficient on one hand, but not being entirely ignorant on the other. We can be considered as passive speakers in the sense that we are not deficient in comprehension, but at the same time, we cannot articulate our thoughts very well.

We make this claim of being an intermediate generation because we bridge the gap between the older generation of monolingual grandparents and our younger siblings who were schooled in the years after the SMC gathered greater momentum.

Shiyun:

"I was once approached by an old lady on the train. She wanted to know if she had missed her stop. She spoke to me in Hokkien...which I could understand, but could not speak well. Hence, I resorted to using Mandarin with bits of Hokkien interspersed in my replies. She half-nodded in understanding and mumbled her thanks and alighted at the next station."

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