Background
The Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC), or the ‘Promote the Use of Mandarin Campaign’ as it was first known, was launched in 1979 by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew with the support of leaders from the Chinese community. The decision to launch a campaign of promoting the use of Mandarin came about after a formal evaluation of Singapore's bilingual education policy in 1978, which showed that it was a failure. That policy was to educate Singaporeans in English and their "mother tongue", which for Chinese Singaporeans meant Mandarin. The Goh Report, an evaluation of Singapore’s education system by Dr. Goh Keng Swee, showed that less than 40% of the student population managed to attain the minimum level of competency in two languages. It was later found out that the learning of Mandarin among the Singaporean Chinese was hindered by the home use of non-Mandarin Chinese languages, better known as 'dialects' in Singapore (principally Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and Hakka). To reinforce the importance of knowing the two languages learnt in school, namely English and mother tongue depending on the student’s ethnicity, the SMC was launched to rectify the problems facing the implementation of the bilingual education policy.
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