Issue 6: Sustainability of Tamil Topic of Interest: How do we use family as a tool to ensure the sustainability of Tamil language?
Introduction
CASE STUDY: Speak Mandarin Campaign( SMC), 1979
• Done by the Promote Mandarin Council, which consists of both private and public sector individuals, with secretariat support from the National Heritage Board.
• When SMC was first launched in 1979, by the then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, the then‘ Ministry of Information and the Arts’ spearheaded it.
• It was a government initiative taken to end the use of dialects in Singapore and encourage the Chinese to speak in Mandarin.
• It was a year-round campaign, focused on creating awareness through publicity and engaging the community.
Objectives
• To simplify the language environment for Chinese Singaporeans.
• To improve communication and understanding amongst Chinese Singaporeans
• To support bilingual educational policy
Outcomes of SMC
• The campaign did not take long to succeed in changing the language habits of Chinese Singaporeans. Predominantly dialect-speaking households fell from 76 % of the population in 1980 to 48 % in 1990, while Mandarin-speaking households rose over the same period from 13 % to 30 %.( Yeen, Yak 2013).
• Surveys carried out 10 years after the campaign was first launched, showed that 85 % of the Chinese population aged 12 and above were able to speak Mandarin fairly well or fluently, compared with 76 % in 1981( Yeen, Yak 2013).
Relevance of SMC to promotion of Tamil
• Family unit was the main target.
• Promotion of a single unitary language to build a cohesive community.
A 2007 SMC poster. From: http:// www. challenge. gov. sg / archives / 2007 _ 07 / images / not _ dialect. jpg
Issue 6: Sustainability of Tamil
Family as a Tool in SMC
• This government effort hinged on the family as one of its means to encourage the usage of Mandarin. This was to ensure that the younger generation( children) would be able to speak and understand that language.
• If language use in such private domains as the family and between friends is to be altered, then obviously the target population must be acting out of a conviction that the campaign is sound and necessary and not just out of a drive to make one ' s publicly visible behaviour acceptable( Newman, 2010, 437).
• When the context is the Speak Mandarin Campaign, Mandarin is portrayed as being part of the core of Chinese culture. When the context, however, is the new ' national education scheme ', whereby English is the first school language of all Singapore pupils, then the significance of language in the preservation of Chinese culture is minimized. Thus, in a speech reported in The Straits Times, 19 February 1984, the Prime Minister emphasized the importance of the family in the transmission of cultural values: ' Language is related to, but not synonymous with, culture.'( Newman, 2010, 448).
•“ There surely were others whose parents had acquired English at a second language level. Since, after 1979, parents were explicitly told that using Mandarin, which is a second language for them, to address their children would make them proficient in this school language and pave the way to a brighter future, they would easily put two and two together, figuring out that using another second language at home would bring similar results, and in fact one pertaining to a more important school language, one brining more promising careers for their children.”( Li, Dewaele, Housen 2002)
•“ The spread of Mandarin has been strongly politically driven and strategically managed. Since 1981, the“ Speak Mandarin Campaign” has been explicitly given an additional purpose of preserving traditional Chinese cultural values. Since 1985, the promotion of Mandarin has also been associated with its economic values, responding to the opening-up and rapid growth of the Chinese economy. Only in more recent years had the spread of Mandarin been consciously raised to the level of defusing the spread of English. This is reflected in the demand for greater use of it in formal and government domains; it is also reflected in the recent campaign themes of urging the English-educated to speak more Mandarin.”( Li, Dewaele, Housen 2002)
PAGE 15 39