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 )
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