Mandarin — World News, Travel and Social Action

Singapore is a tiny Southeast Asian country often celebrated for its diverse and multilingual population. Despite efforts to preserve its cultural heritage, the country is at risk of completely losing the speakers and history of its Chinese dialects.

A street in Singapore’s Chinatown showcasing the four official languages of the country. Courtesy of Rhiannon Koh.

Singapore is an island nation located on the tip of the Malay Peninsula. This city-state is an international port known for its cleanliness, law and order, and neo-futuristic cityscapes. Under its sleek veneer of lights, however, Singapore also harbors an impressive heritage thanks to its multicultural populace.

The official story of Singapore begins in the third century. Early Chinese records show that this island was frequented by the Malays, the Javanese, the Indian Cholas and other passing tradesmen. According to legend, the 14th-century Srivijayan prince Sri Tri Buana stumbled upon the island, saw a tiger, and mistook it for a lion. He then named the island “Singapura,” or the “Lion City.” After nearly five centuries of obscurity, the island resurged into the spotlight when the British statesman Stamford Raffles founded what is now considered modern-day Singapore. Even before Raffles’ influence, the island was already home to an ethnically diverse mix of Chinese, Malays and Indians.

Since its independence in 1965, Singapore has encoded multiculturalism and linguistic diversity into its constitution. Statute 153A states that Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English shall be the four official languages in Singapore; no person shall be discriminated against for whichever they choose. Consequently, multilingual signs are considered the norm and it can cause a public uproar when signs fail to be inclusive. In recent years, however, English has dominated communication in many homes.

Singapore’s city plan emphasizes historical preservation, fostering an urbanscape of both old and new. Courtesy of Rhiannon Koh.

When Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, came to power, he believed that knowledge of dialects undermined the mastery of key languages. Since Singapore was a former British colony and was largely comprised of those of a Chinese background, Yew pushed for English and Mandarin education in schools, essentially cutting down a “thriving linguistic tropical rainforest.” Though these languages gave Singapore a competitive edge in global markets, many Singaporeans lost knowledge of their mother tongues—Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka and others—as well as their connection to grandparents and elders who spoke exclusively in those dialects. A 2015 Department of Statistics study found that in-home dialect use decreased from 18.2% in 2005 to 12.6%. In the wake of this reckoning, many youths are taking steps to reclaim their heritage. Students like Lee Xuan Jin came to understand that Hokkien and Teochew were his “true mother tongues” as opposed to mainland Mandarin. To rekindle the language and improve literacy, Lee launched a Facebook page called Writing in Hokkien.

Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, a testament to the country’s endemic botany and the potential of its future. Courtesy of Rhiannon Koh.

In an op-ed piece for Rice, Natalie Tan questions Singapore’s Speak Mandarin Campaign—a program that effectively rendered dialects obsolete in favor of a unified but vague Chinese culture. Tan argues that Singaporeans lost a bridge to the past. If this trend continues, Singaporeans will lose their ability to translate interviews and other important historical documents. Locals will also lose the stories of their elders as well as the rich histories still bound up in fading languages.

The demise of Chinese dialects taps into the overarching issue of dying languages across the globe. Some feel the dissolution of language is inevitable, citing cultural differences in value and multicultural diversity. Others argue that dying languages should be saved, referencing the invaluable knowledge Indigenous languages harbor. Many languages disappear each year; the difficult question is whether anything should be done to prevent this fate.

Rhiannon Koh

earned her B.A. in Urban Studies & Planning from UC San Diego. Her honors thesis was a speculative fiction piece exploring the aspects of surveillance technology, climate change, and the future of urbanized humanity. She is committed to expanding the stories we tell.

China has begun ambitious plans to end extreme poverty in the country by the end of 2020. Although well-intentioned at first glance, the campaign’s integrity has been called into question.

Southwest China. wnstnsmth. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Aiming to end extreme poverty by 2021, the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th anniversary, President Xi Jinping has launched mass relocations of entire villages in rural southwest China. Over 6,600 members of the Yi ethnic minority group have already been uprooted to custom-built towns commissioned by China’s government.

According to Sichuan province’s party secretary Peng Qinghua, about 80 billion yuan, equivalent to $12 billion, has already been spent to relocate 1.4 million residents. The freshly built towns consist of almost 400,000 homes and approximately 70,000 miles of roads.

These mass relocations seem to contradict Jinping’s original strategy of “Targeted Poverty Alleviation” that he announced in 2013, which in theory would focus on helping individual families through an organized registration system. Now the Communist Party has changed its plan, announcing that ending extreme poverty is impossible without targeting entire communities.

Since millions of rural residents have already been uprooted, many are concerned that the Chinese Communist Party may have a hidden agenda. Specifically, residents fear that mass relocations are intended to force out minority groups to consolidate power among the Han population, China’s predominant ethnic group. The move has come with lifestyle changes for residents, many of whom have received jobs such as babysitting and plantation labor in China’s metropolitan areas. There exists a generational disagreement among residents as well. Older residents have expressed dissatisfaction with such sudden shifts in land ownership and daily routines, while the younger generation seems somewhat more open to the changes.

Part of the government’s funding has focused on upholding the Yi language of Nuosu with support for TV shows, local newspapers and bilingual programs.

This action by the government toward the Yi minority contradicts its previous statements made in favor of entirely erasing minority languages. For instance, the government judged that the language of the Uyghurs is “out of step” and should be replaced with Mandarin.

The government keeps no secret that its poverty reduction initiative intends to promote fundamental social change. Lin Shucheng, party boss for the rural Liangshan prefecture, states that mass relocations are aimed at dissolving what he calls “outdated habits,” such as poor personal hygiene and immoderate dowries.

Although the campaign has been successful at eliminating extreme poverty, the government’s authoritarian measures and contradictory mandates keep residents wary of the future.