Commentary: How to speak to Grandma before her language dies

Screengrab of box-office hit How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies. While the movie is primarily in Thai, grandmother Amah would occasionally speak Teochew, a language M struggled to understand. . The movie tells the story of the grandson, M, who volunteers to move in and take care of his dying grandmother in the hopes of inheriting her estate., when M held Amah’s hand and attempted a Teochew lullaby as Amah took her last breath.

In Singapore, our language and education policies prioritise English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, therefore raising their status in society. Other Chinese languages such as Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese are labelled “dialects”, even when they are not.Linguistically, dialects are variants of a single language, of which when spoken by different dialect speakers, would still be mutually intelligible.

The Speak Mandarin Campaign, launched in 1979, also had an important role to play in speeding up their demise. The early phase of the Speak Mandarin Campaign focused on getting parents and grandparents to learn and use Mandarin in place of Chinese “dialects”. More crucially, older Singaporean Chinese who only speak “dialects” have problems navigating public services, and it is especially critical in hospitals and nursing homes.

Research has shown that grandparents today have heeded the government policies well and pivoted to speaking Mandarin and/or English with their grandchildren. Our next generation of grandparents are the ones who have grown up in the era of post-independence language policies, and so they would have been educated in the official languages. Just like M and Amah in the movie, communication will still take place, just not in Amah’s language.

Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)

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