People use languages like Singlish. People move around, sometimes even migrating from one country to another. Languages follow, and also cross geographical borders.
This is the phenomenon that this chapter examines.
Incoming!
One possible direction of people movement is inwards, from outside Singapore into Singapore.
Singapore, along with many other developed countries, has been struggling with a low fertility rate for many years. The population is more educated than before, and prioritises career advancement over childbearing.
A low fertility rate means that Singapore's population will not replace itself and will eventually decline. Singapore cannot allow this to happen because human resources are the only resources Singapore has to sustain its economy.
So the Singapore government adopts a strategy of attracting foreign talent. The idea is that by wooing capable and skilled workers to move to Singapore and subsequently become citizens, the shortfall in the fertility rate can be compensated for.
Besides foreign talent, Singapore also brings in lowly paid labourers for jobs such as construction that the educated Singapore populace doesn't want to do.
The effect of this has been an upheaval in the previously established Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others (CMIO) ethnic order. With more and more foreigners from a variety of countries taking up citizenship and even marrying and producing children in Singapore, it's becoming increasingly difficult to categorise people neatly into the CMIO groups. Indeed, the Others category accounted for 3.3% of the population in 2010, a sharp increase from 1.4% in 2000.
In response, the government allowed double-barrelled racial identification in 2011, in which people with mixed parentage could decide to take up both of their parents' races with a hyphen in between.
But this comes with its own set of problems.
For one, the race that comes first takes precedence over the race that comes second for official purposes. So someone with a Chinese father and a Malay mother can choose to call themselves Chinese-Malay or Malay-Chinese. If they opt for "Chinese-Malay", they are regarded as being "more Chinese, less Malay" and will take Chinese as a mother tongue language in school and get financial support from the Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC) in times of trouble. If they opt for "Malay-Chinese", they are regarded as being "more
Malay, less Chinese" and will take Malay as a mother tongue language
in school and get financial support from Mendaki, the equivalent of the CDAC for the Malay community, in times of trouble. This means that having a double-barrelled race is not truly being of mixed heritage from the government's perspective, since there's still a "dominant" race and a "less dominant" one.
Additionally, the government has said that it won't be extending the allowance to more than two races. In other words, it will not be allowing triple-barrelled or quad-barrelled races. This raises questions about how children of parents who themselves have double-barrelled races will be handled, since for example a child of an Indian-Malay father and a Caucasian-Chinese mother could technically identify as any permutation of the four ethnicities, for instance Caucasian-Chinese-Indian-Malay.
The rising proportion of foreigners and citizens of foreign descent poses two challenges for Singapore's language policy.
First, the mother tongue policy is becoming difficult to implement. More people don't fit neatly into the Chinese, Malay, and Indian categories, so they don't have an official mother tongue that can be assigned to them. And because the government insists that mother tongues must be Asian to resist the effects of Westernisation and tie people back to their cultural roots, English cannot serve as a mother tongue. So we have a problem: There are increasing numbers of children of mixed and foreign parentage, including even Westerners, in local schools who are forced to learn mother tongues for the sake of it, even if does not mean anything to them culturally. Related to this, English is losing its neutrality. The government wanted it to be the primary language for communication between all races because it was a non-Asian language and did not "belong" to any of the ethnic groups in Singapore. But now, there are many foreigners, particularly those of Western origin, for whom English is a native language. This calls for a rethink of the government's language policies with regard to the roles of English and the mother tongues.
The second point relates directly to Singlish. Supporters of Singlish have argued that it serves as a marker of the Singapore identity and a unifying force to bind all Singaporeans regardless of background. But if this is so, then the unifying force is slowly weakening as foreigners, who don't come with a ready ability to speak Singlish, "dilute" the Singapore identity. More sinisterly, Singaporeans are using Singlish competence as a
shibboleth. A shibboleth is a distinctive characteristic. The ability to speak Singlish is assumed to be a shibboleth that distinguishes a Singaporean from a non-Singaporean. So those who cannot speak Singlish are treated as outsiders. In this way, Singlish has been turned into a weapon. Anti-foreigner sentiments are running higher in Singapore as it is perceived that foreign talent is depriving Singaporeans of jobs. Since Singlish is used to distinguish Singaporeans from non-Singaporeans, those who don't speak Singlish will have a large target painted on their backs. Even Singaporeans who cannot speak Singlish, for example those who grew up overseas before returning to Singapore, as well as Singaporeans who consciously don't use Singlish, are seen as "not Singaporean" and may be the subject of vitriol.
Exodus
Another direction that people move in is outwards, from Singapore to other countries. When this happens, they take Singlish to foreign lands.
In the early days of Singapore, the government was keen to keep Singaporeans rooted physically in Singapore. They built large public housing estates and sold the apartments in these estates at heavily subsidised prices, so that the majority of Singaporeans own their homes. In this way, the government hoped to foster among the people a sense of attachment to Singapore.
With the advent of globalisation, the government's mindset had to adapt to keep up with the times. Singaporeans were increasingly going overseas to work and do business. The physical connection to Singapore soil didn't apply as broadly as before. But the government was still anxious to remind overseas Singaporeans of their identity as Singaporeans. This was largely spurred by pragmatism: Singaporeans who lose sight of their Singaporean identity and renounce citizenship will contribute to brain drain, causing the Singapore workforce to become less talented as a whole.
The government started some initiatives to connect overseas Singaporeans back to their homeland. For example, Singapore Day is a regular event held in major cities such as New York City, London, and Melbourne. During Singapore Day, famous hawkers are flown from Singapore to give overseas Singaporeans a taste of home.
Singlish is often seen and heard at Singapore Day events, with Singaporeans having a "gleeful time" using it with one another. Under normal circumstances, overseas Singaporeans don't get to use Singlish except on the rare occasion that a group of them gets together with no foreigners present.
Interestingly, intermarriages between overseas Singaporeans and foreigners in other countries have taken place. These marriages have allowed Singlish to spread even further. For example, a Malaysian woman who could use Manglish, the Malaysian counterpart to Singlish, moved to Singapore as a young adult to study and begin her career. While in Singapore, she picked up Singlish. Later, she moved again to San Francisco where she married an American. According to her, the American man picked up Singlish from her and uses it "unself-consciously", even to engage in arguments with her as couples do. Hers is not a one-off case. A female Malay Singaporean who married a Swedish man in Stockholm said her husband had learned Singlish through interacting with her and her circle of Singaporean friends in Sweden. Singaporeans in America "noted that some of their American colleagues would express interest in Singlish and would ask for demonstrations of this variety".
The class divide
Supporters of Singlish say that it transcends class boundaries because it is used by Singaporeans from all walks of life, a claim that the government disputes. In reality, Singlish and class are closely linked.
In 1999, then-Prime Minister Mr Goh Chok Tong defined two types of Singaporean: the
cosmopolitans and the
heartlanders.
The cosmopolitans are the ones who migrate out of Singapore because they have good career opportunities overseas. They are professionals in the banking, IT, engineering, science and technology sectors, and they speak "standard" English as well as their mother tongue.
The heartlanders are from more humble backgrounds. They are taxi-drivers, stallholders, provision shop owners, production workers, and contractors, and none of them leave Singapore because they can't find jobs overseas. Most importantly, they speak Singlish.
Mr Goh explained that both types of Singaporean have a role to play. They support each other. The cosmopolitans bring prosperity to Singapore, which benefits the heartlanders economically. Meanwhile, the heartlanders anchor the cultural roots of Singapore by maintaining the social values that Singaporeans hold dear, so that the cosmopolitans won't lose touch with their inner Singaporean. If the cosmopolitans and the heartlanders go into conflict, Singapore society will crumble, warned Mr Goh.
Problematically, Mr Goh claims that Singlish is a feature of the heartlanders. But the government does use Singlish to communicate with the cosmopolitans too, such as during Singapore Day. And the cosmopolitans use Singlish with one another, as mentioned earlier. So Singlish is used by both heartlanders and cosmopolitans, which means it can indeed transcend class boundaries and bond Singaporeans from various socioeconomic groups.
On the other hand, Singlish supporters say that "Singlish is a language for fun, humour, and one where speakers are also encouraged to deliberately play around with linguistic conventions". But they're failing to acknowledge that the heartlanders use Singlish for more mundane and even serious purposes too, mostly because they lack the ability to use "standard" English. This lack of ability also doesn't allow them to play around with language the way Singlish supporters do. It is this lack that Singlish supporters are citing when they claim that Singlish can bond Singaporeans from various socioeconomic groups. But by their reasoning, only cosmopolitans use Singlish, at least to the fullest extent of being playful with it!
How is it possible for both sides to have such big holes in their arguments? Maybe it's because they have different definitions of what Singlish really is. They can't hold a logical debate if their understanding of the most fundamental issue "What is Singlish?" is extremely divergent.
In the next chapter, which is the last, we will try to figure out the answer to the question "What is Singlish?", as we grapple with the many complicating factors involved such as the ambiguity of the "Singaporean identity" in this globalising world.
