Singapore Tamil Youth Conference 2016 Toolkit Toolkit Final as of 17082016 | Page 19

Topic of Interest: How do we use family as a tool to ensure the sustainability of Tamil language?
CASE STUDY: Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC), 1979
Introduction
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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.
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Objectives
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To simplify the language environment for Chinese
Singaporeans.
To improve communication
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and understanding amongst Chinese Singaporeans
To support bilingual educational policy
Outcomes of SMC
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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).
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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
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Family unit was the main target.
Promotion of a single unitary language to build a cohesive
community.
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A 2007 SMC poster.
From:http://www.challenge.gov.sg/archives/2007_07/images/
not_dialect.jpg
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, 4