March 18, 2009
MANDARIN FOR CHINESE SINGAPOREANS
Nurturing a key advantage
Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew spoke at the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Speak Mandarin Campaign yesterday. We carry here an edited excerpt of his speech. THIRTY years ago, I launched this Speak Mandarin Campaign. Chinese students were learning Mandarin in school. Unfortunately, they spoke dialects among themselves and at home. When I watched interviews on our Chinese TV channel in the 1960s and 1970s, I found students and workers speaking Mandarin haltingly.
Mandarin has to be the common language of Chinese Singaporeans. If the Government had left language habits to evolve undirected, Chinese Singaporeans would be speaking an adulterated Hokkien-Teochew dialect.
To effectively promote Mandarin, we closed down all dialect programmes on radio and TV from 1979. Also, I was setting a bad example by making speeches in Hokkien in the 1960s and 1970s so as to reach the largest number of Chinese. From 1979, I decided to stop speaking in Hokkien and switched to Mandarin. Had I not done this, Hokkien/Teochew would be the common language among the Chinese in Singapore, not Mandarin.
The value of a language is its usefulness - not just in Singapore, but also in the wider world. If you speak Hokkien or Cantonese, you reach some 60 million in Fujian and Taiwan, or about 100 million in Guangdong and Hong Kong. With Mandarin, you can speak to 1.3 billion Chinese from all over China.
I understand the strong emotional ties to one's mother tongue. However, the trend is clear. In two generations, Mandarin will become our mother tongue.
English is the key language for our people to make a living. It is the second language of all non-English-speaking peoples. Multinational companies use English. Internet data banks are mostly in English. PRC Chinese are learning English with great effort. If Mandarin were our first language, Singaporeans would be of little use to China. They do not need more Mandarin speakers. English gives us easy access to English-speaking societies and the developed world. Thus, Singaporeans bring value-add to China.
To keep a language alive, you have to speak and read it frequently. The more you use one language, the less you use other languages. So the more languages you learn, the greater the difficulties of retaining them at a high level of fluency.
I have learnt and used six languages in my lifetime - English, Malay, Latin, Japanese, Mandarin and Hokkien. English is my master language. My Hokkien has gone rusty, my Mandarin has improved. I have lost my Japanese and Latin, and can no longer make fluent speeches in Malay without preparation. This is called 'language loss'.
To become a united nation, the population must speak a common language, so that they can communicate with one another. Singapore's multiracial peoples would not have been united if we had used Mandarin as our common language. All non-Chinese, 25 per cent of Singaporeans, would have been disadvantaged. The result would have been endless strife, as in Sri Lanka, where Singhalese was made the national language and the Tamil-speaking were marginalised. We made the right decision to use English as our common language.
We also retained the teaching of mother tongues. Even in 1959 when we first became the Government, my colleagues and I could foresee a time when China would open up and become a huge economic power. Our choice of English has enabled our fast growth. Now with China's economy growing, parents and students no longer complain of the burden of learning Chinese, a difficult language.
China wants to collaborate with us because through English, we are able to connect with the West. At the same time, our Mandarin is fluent enough to communicate with PRC Chinese.
The Speak Mandarin Campaign and our bilingual education policy have resulted in a growing number of young Singaporeans speaking Mandarin among themselves in schools, the Institute of Technical Education, polytechnics and universities. They also watch Mandarin TV more than English TV.
Quite a few Singaporeans with only AO- or O-level passes in Chinese have sent me e-mail from China to thank me for making Mandarin compulsory for them. With this basic foundation, they have been able to expand their vocabulary and increase their fluency after a few months in China. Singapore Press Holdings distributes a free bilingual newspaper called Wobao or my paper, which is bilingual in Chinese and English. It has a glossary of translations for the more difficult English and Chinese words and phrases.
School examinations no longer concentrate on mo xie, dictation from memory, or ting xie, listening and writing. They are not needed in real life. With computer programs, you can type the pinyin and the characters will appear. Since 2007, we have allowed the use of digital dictionaries in national examinations.
Singapore's advantage has been that we have a Mandarin-speaking community. We have newspapers, magazines, books and television programmes in Chinese. We need some 300 Singaporean graduates each year who have Chinese language and culture at a high level, to interact with their China counterparts. The flow of new migrants from China as citizens and permanent residents will help in this process.
English is our dominant language. Most students will have little difficulty in mastering working-level English. However, if parents speak in English to their children at home, learning Mandarin will be a problem. Research of American-born Chinese disclosed that when these second-generation Chinese try to learn Chinese in college, those who speak English at home found mastering Chinese as difficult as Caucasian-Americans; those whose parents spoke to them in Mandarin easily made the grade. My advice is for both parents to speak Mandarin to their children if they can. If one speaks in Mandarin and the other in English, the child will grow up speaking more English than Mandarin.
