Thank you for sharing this! It was such a great read!
This is AI used to benefit society and I am glad it comes from a place where people usually think it is difficult to use technology. It was so interesting to read that teacher say that children understand faster concepts when spoken in their mother tongues because they don't need to translate first. Though I agree, it would reduce chances for them to even go through Central and West Africa for working opportunities, it is still such a great way to preserve one's culture. I believe though French should still be taught because it is de facto, whether we like it or not, the lingua franca of many African countries. Opportunities aren't just in the Occident anymore.
It's astonishing how easily and quickly we lose languages - my parents speak Hokkien, a Chinese dialect said to be older than mandarin, but they never spoke it to us and it is not taught in schools in Singapore...and sometimes I think if everyone was like me, how will this language survive?
Thank you for your comment. Your story is so fascinating because I don't think people talk enough about how China is that colonialist and imperialist country that has influenced so many countries in Asia.
Can I ask you why you think your parents never talk to you in Hokkien? How is Hokkien perceived in Singapore? I am asking because I know Hokkien is spoken in Southern East China, Taiwan and the Philippines, if I am not mistaken, which should mean you have quite a diverse diaspora.
Wow, where do I begin? It's a long story! Everything I say needs fact checking, but as far as I know, education policies Singapore gained independence from the British had a lot to do with how languages have been learnt/passed down over the years. After independence, the elected government instituted a bilingualism policy, which meant everyone in school studied English as their first language, and their mother tongue as their second language (eg Indians studied Tamil, Malays studied Malay, and Chinese studied Mandarin). I think this was done mainly to keep things simple for a fledging government to function, plus it was intended to unify a diverse population that spoke different languages. English was also a useful language for a small country that expected to grow through international trade and exchange.
Dialects were left out of this policy…I wonder whether it simply wasn’t practical to teach it schools, but it's also notable that within the Chinese population, there’s a history of clan clashes between dialect groups, which were linked to gangs, so I don’t think dialects were viewed very favourably.
That attitude continued into the 1970s, when the government felt dialects were an impediment to getting citizens educated and literate. So it launched a Speak Mandarin campaign and dialects were banned from the state-owned TV and radio channels. This is still in force and sadly it has made dialects something of a dying thing in Singapore, although it is still widely spoken elsewhere in countries with a sizeable Chinese population (neighbouring Malaysia has lots of TV and music programming in Cantonese catering to its Chinese population, for example). Dialects became something that was orally passed down by our elders.
As for how Hokkien is perceived: together with Mandarin, dialects were seen as "lower class" and English speakers formed the elite, which of course is due to the fact that we were a British colony, and speaking English and studying in schools started by the British was a mark of prestige. Chinese immigrants did become very wealthy and founded schools of their own to educate Chinese people (including Singapore's second oldest university), but English-educated politicians (who were Chinese, Indian and Malay) won the political battle post-independence and I think that set the stage for English remaining the language of the elite, and a mark of progress.
While I was born in Singapore, my parents are migrants: my mother is Taiwanese, my father is Malaysian Chinese I was raised in a Mandarin-speaking household and my proficiency in English really only happened when I went to school. Maybe because ours is a migrant family, we didn't subscribe to the prevailing attitude of the day in Singapore, which was that Mandarin (and mother tongues in general) was the "less classy" language. Growing up, I loved being fluent in two languages, and in a way, I got the last laugh when China become an economic super power and speaking Mandarin became an advantage.
But I did lose dialects in the process. My parents both preferred speaking in Mandarin, and simply felt it wasn't necessary to teach it to us since they didn't learn Hokkien schools either, they just spoke it growing up. But unlike my parents, we did not grow up in an environment hearing a lot of dialects, so we never picked it up...
Oh wow Lin, thank you so much for sharing this. That's so precious! If you don't mind I'll share it in chat.
Everything you wrote here is so fascinating because it is a mixture of colonialism, politics, economic hegemony and above all, the stark difference between languages and dialects. It's also fascinating to see how your family didn't conform and spoke to you in Mandarin at a time it was 'unpopular'. I might be wrong, but your parents non conforming to the status quo might be due to the fact that they were both immigrants from different countries, and so it wouldn't make sense to them to switch to English because it wasn't part of their daily life to talk it.
To come back to dialects it is so sad what I read because be it with Hokkien or Douala and Ewodi, it seems like more and more dialects will disappear for reasons you and I mentioned. It is weird to think that in such a modern day and age, society isn't actively looking at preserving them, especially when we are so obsessed with many things of the past. Furthermore, it is not like we don't have the means to keep them alive. This is where AI, technology should be a good thing for humanity, but since there is no monetary benefits behind it, it is not pushed.
Hi sure, feel free to share it, and glad you thought it was interesting! My mother, who has passed away, actually never learnt to speak English at all, thought she learnt to understand quite a bit. I never asked why :(
And while I bemoan the loss of dialects, other ethnics in Singapore are also bemoaning the dominance of Mandarin, to the extent that kids from mixed race families often opt for their kids to learn Mandarin, because it seems like a practical skill. In some schools, Malay and Tamil have isn't even offered and kids who study this as their Mother Tongue have to attend classes in other schools to make up for it. There's so much to this that I haven't been able to even scratch past the surface!
Hello Marguerite,
Thank you for sharing this! It was such a great read!
This is AI used to benefit society and I am glad it comes from a place where people usually think it is difficult to use technology. It was so interesting to read that teacher say that children understand faster concepts when spoken in their mother tongues because they don't need to translate first. Though I agree, it would reduce chances for them to even go through Central and West Africa for working opportunities, it is still such a great way to preserve one's culture. I believe though French should still be taught because it is de facto, whether we like it or not, the lingua franca of many African countries. Opportunities aren't just in the Occident anymore.
It's astonishing how easily and quickly we lose languages - my parents speak Hokkien, a Chinese dialect said to be older than mandarin, but they never spoke it to us and it is not taught in schools in Singapore...and sometimes I think if everyone was like me, how will this language survive?
Hello Lin,
Thank you for your comment. Your story is so fascinating because I don't think people talk enough about how China is that colonialist and imperialist country that has influenced so many countries in Asia.
Can I ask you why you think your parents never talk to you in Hokkien? How is Hokkien perceived in Singapore? I am asking because I know Hokkien is spoken in Southern East China, Taiwan and the Philippines, if I am not mistaken, which should mean you have quite a diverse diaspora.
Wow, where do I begin? It's a long story! Everything I say needs fact checking, but as far as I know, education policies Singapore gained independence from the British had a lot to do with how languages have been learnt/passed down over the years. After independence, the elected government instituted a bilingualism policy, which meant everyone in school studied English as their first language, and their mother tongue as their second language (eg Indians studied Tamil, Malays studied Malay, and Chinese studied Mandarin). I think this was done mainly to keep things simple for a fledging government to function, plus it was intended to unify a diverse population that spoke different languages. English was also a useful language for a small country that expected to grow through international trade and exchange.
Dialects were left out of this policy…I wonder whether it simply wasn’t practical to teach it schools, but it's also notable that within the Chinese population, there’s a history of clan clashes between dialect groups, which were linked to gangs, so I don’t think dialects were viewed very favourably.
That attitude continued into the 1970s, when the government felt dialects were an impediment to getting citizens educated and literate. So it launched a Speak Mandarin campaign and dialects were banned from the state-owned TV and radio channels. This is still in force and sadly it has made dialects something of a dying thing in Singapore, although it is still widely spoken elsewhere in countries with a sizeable Chinese population (neighbouring Malaysia has lots of TV and music programming in Cantonese catering to its Chinese population, for example). Dialects became something that was orally passed down by our elders.
As for how Hokkien is perceived: together with Mandarin, dialects were seen as "lower class" and English speakers formed the elite, which of course is due to the fact that we were a British colony, and speaking English and studying in schools started by the British was a mark of prestige. Chinese immigrants did become very wealthy and founded schools of their own to educate Chinese people (including Singapore's second oldest university), but English-educated politicians (who were Chinese, Indian and Malay) won the political battle post-independence and I think that set the stage for English remaining the language of the elite, and a mark of progress.
While I was born in Singapore, my parents are migrants: my mother is Taiwanese, my father is Malaysian Chinese I was raised in a Mandarin-speaking household and my proficiency in English really only happened when I went to school. Maybe because ours is a migrant family, we didn't subscribe to the prevailing attitude of the day in Singapore, which was that Mandarin (and mother tongues in general) was the "less classy" language. Growing up, I loved being fluent in two languages, and in a way, I got the last laugh when China become an economic super power and speaking Mandarin became an advantage.
But I did lose dialects in the process. My parents both preferred speaking in Mandarin, and simply felt it wasn't necessary to teach it to us since they didn't learn Hokkien schools either, they just spoke it growing up. But unlike my parents, we did not grow up in an environment hearing a lot of dialects, so we never picked it up...
Oh wow Lin, thank you so much for sharing this. That's so precious! If you don't mind I'll share it in chat.
Everything you wrote here is so fascinating because it is a mixture of colonialism, politics, economic hegemony and above all, the stark difference between languages and dialects. It's also fascinating to see how your family didn't conform and spoke to you in Mandarin at a time it was 'unpopular'. I might be wrong, but your parents non conforming to the status quo might be due to the fact that they were both immigrants from different countries, and so it wouldn't make sense to them to switch to English because it wasn't part of their daily life to talk it.
To come back to dialects it is so sad what I read because be it with Hokkien or Douala and Ewodi, it seems like more and more dialects will disappear for reasons you and I mentioned. It is weird to think that in such a modern day and age, society isn't actively looking at preserving them, especially when we are so obsessed with many things of the past. Furthermore, it is not like we don't have the means to keep them alive. This is where AI, technology should be a good thing for humanity, but since there is no monetary benefits behind it, it is not pushed.
Hi sure, feel free to share it, and glad you thought it was interesting! My mother, who has passed away, actually never learnt to speak English at all, thought she learnt to understand quite a bit. I never asked why :(
And while I bemoan the loss of dialects, other ethnics in Singapore are also bemoaning the dominance of Mandarin, to the extent that kids from mixed race families often opt for their kids to learn Mandarin, because it seems like a practical skill. In some schools, Malay and Tamil have isn't even offered and kids who study this as their Mother Tongue have to attend classes in other schools to make up for it. There's so much to this that I haven't been able to even scratch past the surface!
Too many thoughts to share concisely in a comment but this article I just read immediately made me think of your piece! https://restofworld.org/2024/mali-ai-translate-local-language-education/?ref=sentiers.media