, a young Chinese Singaporean, learned that her grandmother was terminally ill, she signed up for a workshop in the Hokkien language run by LearnDialect.sg, a social enterprise founded to help Singaporeans communicate with the city-state’s older Chinese residents—including within their own families. Sandy is fluent in English and Mandarin, the official “mother tongue” of Chinese Singaporeans. Her grandmother spoke little of either.
Mandarin is a standardised version of the language spoken by the people of the vast plains of northern China. Yet hardly any of the Chinese from whom Singaporeans are descended hailed from there. They came instead from the southern provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan, and so spoke different languages: Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka, along with two Hokkien-related tongues, Teochew and Hainanese.
So dialects were disparaged. In the early 1980s television and radio programming in these languages all but disappeared, cutting many people adrift. “To speak dialect with your child,” the government warned, “is to ruin his future.” By the campaign’s own yardsticks, the success is striking. The use of Chinese vernaculars at home has collapsed, from 76% of Chinese households in 1980 to 16% in 2015. Over the same period, the use of Mandarin rose, from 13% of Chinese households to 46%.
Certainly the direction Hong Kong is going in too.
how sad...
The same is true in the UK and the US with English, originally only native to English blood, wiping out mother tongues such as Welsh, Gaelic, Cherokee, and Pochantas!
PRC influence, obviously
horrible
it seems that opposing diversity is the real strength
Banyan needs to get an education if s/he is to be able to explain what s/he writes about - understanding the relationship between language, race, class & power would help
Lee Kuan Yew nevertheless gave Singapore good governance.
That's the problem with the dictator . . . bad ideas are enacted. Singapore should enhance its diversity. = Democracy is about caring for all
A good thing. No one is willing to be influenced by totalitarian ideology through simplified Chinese language.
新加坡之所以是华人最棒的国家,很重要的就是脱离中文,新加坡的中文几乎完全消失了!!!真棒! 其次是香港,一半英文,一半粤语,经济 收入等也在第二 第三是台湾,一半台语,一般中文,经济 和收入第三. 最末是中国,全是中文,经济收入最差. 看到了吗?脱支越彻底,人民越幸福!就这么简单!
OKINASAI.
Stay home !!! We do not need a second round of this crap !!
👏🏻🙂. Let's make all the kids in the world speak the same languaje.
This should be mandatory reading for South Africa's black middle class
Depends on what you mean by “wipe out”.
omesh wmnjoya your thoughts, please?
Are you sure? Maybe teens are just using this as an excuse so they don't have to talk to their grandparents. 'Sorry, Grandma, I would love to chat, but I don't speak the language.'
Sad indeed
The modern state of Singapore is a British creation, and the English there is very good.
SHOW US THEN, The Economist! You provide pretty pictures/ ILLUSTRATIONS and pretty wording/ LINGUISTICS, BUT... ZERO EVIDENCE... no footage, no film, no REAL HARDCORE EVIDENCE of your claims! HOW COME, The Economist!?! XXxx
Hope they kept their fathers' noses. Their fathers' noses.
Hokkien is about only one keft
Sold out.
Priority for English and one mother tongue as it is tough to master more than 2 languages I only studied English my time but I speak Cantonese, some Hokkien, Malay, French and v little Mandarin
There's good, there's bad.
Lolz
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