Speak Mandarin Campaign - Criticism

Criticism

The Speak Mandarin Campaign has come under criticism from several fronts. Non-Mandarin Chinese language speakers have complained that their children have to study two foreign languages — English and Mandarin. This is contrasted to a possible alternative policy of English and their native language, and that the emphasis on Mandarin threatens family ties, as older generations are often not conversant in Mandarin (unless it is their native tongue). Some critics include that the Mandarin education system's goal of promoting cultural identity has left many younger generations of Mandarin speakers unable to communicate with their non-Mandarin Chinese language-speaking grandparents. They have also compared the policy to that of Russification and intentional language elimination.

Lee Kuan Yew himself recognized this and acknowledged that for many Chinese Singaporeans, Mandarin is a "stepmother tongue" and "dialect is the real mother tongue". Further, in 2009, in spite of the ongoing 华文？谁怕谁 (Be heard in Chinese) movement, Lee admitted that the teaching of Mandarin Chinese in schools went the "wrong way" and that due to his insistence on bilingualism, "successive generations of students paid a heavy price". In June 2010, Lee also said that "Mandarin is important but it remains a second language in Singapore".

Non-Chinese language communities (principally the Malays and Tamils), on the other hand, have argued that the effort placed into promoting Mandarin weakens the role of English as Singapore's lingua franca and threatens to marginalize Singapore's minorities. In fact, dialects such as Hokkien, along with Malay have served as a language for the Straits Chinese, or Peranakan. In the Singaporean and Malaysian Version of the Hokkien Language, one cannot deny the plethora of Malay loan words, and vice versa. During the 1960s, Bazzar Lingua was a confluence of Malay, Hokkien, Tamil, English and other dialects. Some have expressed concern that requirements of Mandarin fluency or literacy could be used to discriminate against non-Chinese minorities. Current employment laws prohibit racial discrimination but employers often circumvent this by requiring applicants to be bilingual (presumably in Mandarin and English).

The Speak Mandarin Campaign which sees the promotion of Mandarin over other Chinese dialects, has effectively led to a reduction in the number of dialect speakers in Singapore today. With the success however, concerns were raised on the issues of preservation of these other Chinese dialects. In March 2009, when The Straits Times ran an article by Dr Ng Bee Chin, who was quoted as saying that "40 years ago, we were even more multilingual.... All it takes is one generation for a language to die."

The article soon caught the attention of Mr Chee Hong Tat, the Principal Private Secretary of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. In the letter from Mr Chee to the editor in The Straits Times Forum, he highlighted the importance of English and Mandarin over dialects and spoke of how speaking dialects ultimately "interferes with the learning of Mandarin and English". He also added that "it would be stupid for any Singapore agency or NTU to advocate the learning of dialects, which must be at the expense of English and Mandarin." However, the learning of Mandarin in its very essence only serves to alienate the younger generation from their roots, as it has expedited the communication gap between their dialect-speaking Grandparents. The Speak Mandarin Campaign is only a self-serving campaign for people who have closer ties with the Mandarins in the North - it has, indeed pushed the families of staunch dialects speakers to choose English over PuTongHua.