Speak Mandarin Campaign - Implementation

Implementation

The Speak Mandarin Campaign is a year-round campaign, which uses publicity and activities in the community to create awareness and to facilitate the learning of Mandarin. Every year, the Speak Mandarin Campaign will collaborate with different partners to reach out to a wider scope of audience. For instance, in 2005, the partners of Speak Mandarin Campaign, which are the Singapore Zoological Gardens and Singapore Night Safari, started to add Chinese interpretation for signs and directions and even the pamphlet were written in Chinese. By doing so, not only does it help tourists from China, it also helps create a learning environment for local children to learn Chinese.

Initially in 1979, where the campaign first started, use of Mandarin was promoted from all public domains; in the early years, there was some selective dialect suppression as well. Government officers including those in hospitals were not allowed to use dialects except to those over 60 years old. People under 40 in the service line were also made to communicate in Mandarin instead of dialects.

Attempts to limit the domain of dialect were hindered in the 1980s by the aggressive expansion of Hong Kong's Cantopop industry into Singapore, although state-owned television tried to simultaneously promote Mandarin by requiring subtitles in the standard language on dialect programming. In addition, in collaboration with Speak Mandarin Campaign, Golden Village has started to show more Chinese movies especially of local production to increase the awareness for speaking Mandarin. The Singaporean state did not prioritize the suppression of the dialects However, suppression of dialects was never a major part of the campaign, since the government was tolerant of old peoples' use of dialect, and assumed that young people would have no use for dialects. In fact, the government promoted Cantonese opera as a traditional ethnic performance and sponsored night classes in Cantonese music in government-run community centers.

One of the most influential implementations that the Speak Mandarin Campaign has used is The Straits Times. For instance, as part of the campaign to promote greater use for Chinese, the English newspaper would publish daily Mandarin vocabulary lessons in order to help Singaporeans improve their standard for Mandarin.

Other ways of encouraging people to learn Chinese is to sign up for speak Mandarin courses, listen to Chinese music, explore online resources and download audio lessons, which can be found in the official website of Speak Mandarin Campaign. Besides, in 2005, there were publications of CD-ROMs and tapes on Mandarin lessons, handbooks of English-Chinese terms as well as telephone Mandarin lessons to help people to learn Mandarin. Notably, in 2006, My paper which was published by the Singapore Press Holdings became the first free Chinese newspaper to be given out in Singapore. In 2008, My paper went from being a Chinese newspaper into a bilingual newspaper and the circulation rate hit 300,000.

Education is one of the most effective way to promote use of Mandarin. In year 2004, Singapore government specially set up a committee to review methods for teaching Chinese courses, whereby creative Chinese writing courses were set up in schools in 2005, as a way to intrigue and engage students in learning Chinese. Also, other education organizations such as Nanyang Technological University has set up a Chinese faculty and even collaborates with Confucius Institute to help train teachers with regards to Chinese language, to improve the standard of Chinese education in Singapore and in order to influence people with regards to the use of Chinese.

Former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, a native English speaker who had learned Mandarin later in life, expressed his concern about the declining proficiency of Mandarin among younger Singaporeans. In a parliamentary speech, he said:

"Singaporeans must learn to juggle English and Mandarin". Therefore, he launched a television program, 华语!, in January 2005, in an attempt to attract young viewers to learn Mandarin.

Following this, in June 2005, Lee published a book, Keeping My Mandarin Alive, documenting his decades of effort to master Mandarin — a language which he had to re-learn due to disuse:

"...because I don't use it so much, therefore it gets disused and there's language loss. Then I have to revive it. It's a terrible problem because learning it in adult life, it hasn't got the same roots in your memory."

In the same year 2005, the campaign started to rebrand Chinese by using local artists and cool leisure activities, hence the birth of the slogan "Mandarin, Cool!".