From Instrumentality to Identity and Culture in Singapore Standard English

Coaxing Yarns out of Disjointed Sentences: from Instrumentality to Identity and Culture in Singapore Standard English JEREMY LIM University of Toronto [email protected] The Singapore government (the People's Action Party) stresses the importance of standard English through the education system, the press, and also the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM, launched in 2000). In this paper, I focus on the press and the SGEM to discuss two official approaches to the promotion of Singapore Standard English. One approach has involved emphasizing an SSE that is instrumental in ensuring Singapore’s growth in the global economy. The other approach involves allowing SSE to serve identity and cultural functions. My paper argues that Singapore's language policy is shifting beyond the economic instrumentality of the nation-building period; at the same time, a more culturally adaptable SSE has emerged in a citizen-led SGEM event and some autobiographical narratives published in the press. Economic Survival and Instrumental SSE in Postcolonial Singapore The history of Singapore’s instrumental language policy can be traced back to the country’s pre- independent days, when heated conflicts between Malaysian and Singaporean governments over granting ethnic Malays special Bumiputera (‘son of the soil’) heightened racial tensions. After declaring independence from Britain in 1963, limited natural resources and communist threats compelled a predominantly Chinese group of Singaporean leaders to join the Malaysian government, but the two governments maintained irreconcilable views about the race-based Bumiputera policy. Whereas the Singaporean leaders wanted a meritocratic society, the Malaysian government wanted to assert the supremacy of ethnic Malays. When Singapore was ejected from Malaysia in 1965, racial tensions continued to cause social unrest in the tiny nation that faced an uncertain economic future. There was an urgent need to establish a lingua franca to defuse racial tensions and bridge Chinese, Indian, and Malay communities. Consequently, the Singapore government retained the colonial English as a racially neutral medium that all Singaporeans could access regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. In 1974, the government made the pragmatic decision of implementing English as the primary language of instruction in schools. Because English had to be learned as a foreign language by all, everyone competed ‘at From Instrumentality to Identity…in Singapore Standard English JEREMY LIM 2 school or work, on an equal footing, through their acquired skill in the English language’ (Chua 2003, 71).1 In addition to maintaining social equality and order, the race-neutral English also enabled the young nation to benefit from a globalizing economy. Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, firmly believed that ‘[w]ithout the English language, we [Singaporeans] might not have succeeded in teaching so quickly a whole generation the knowledge and skills which made them able to work the machines brought in from the industrialized countries of the West’ (as quoted in Wee 2003, 214). Proficiency in English served the function of providing access to the scientific and technological modernity of developed nations. The utilitarian and deracializing SSE was made doubly ‘neutral’ because of the government's concern with deculturalization. Analyzing language policy statements about the self-rule era from the late 1950s to mid-1960s, and the period of industrial development from the 1960s to the late 1980s, Rita Elaine Silver observes that while the instrumental SSE was ‘economic-development oriented’ and provided ‘opportunities for inter-ethnic communication’ (2005, 54), Asian languages were represented as having connections with ‘personal identity’, ‘a sense of heritage’, and intra-ethnic communication (53). The first Prime Minister firmly believed in suppressing Western influences in a developing society, where Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay (the institutionalized mother tongues) would fulfill identity and cultural functions for the main ethnic groups. In his words, such a language policy would prevent Singaporeans from ‘mindlessly aping the Americans or British with no basic values or culture of their own’ (PM Lee, 1972, quoted by Silver 2005, 54). In a time when policies were determined by nation- building exigencies, the pragmatic government abstracted a ‘standard’ from British/American English to generate wealth for its people. The Government's Reactions to Mainstream Singlish Scholars and literary writers, being concerned with cultural expression, tend to criticize the government’s language policy by associating instrumentality with inauthenticity and affirming the role of Singlish as an identity marker. Chng Huang Hoon describes Singlish as a ‘magic element that will unite all Singaporeans’ (2003, 58). Rani Rubdy argues that Singlish has emerged as the symbol of intraethnic identity and cultural integration in Singapore, in total contravention with the ideologies of the language planners. Importantly, Singlish has come to be regarded as the quintessential mark of ‘Singaporeanness’ by a 1 Chua Beng Huat asserts that the colonial English only benefited children ‘with tertiary educated, English-speaking, parents of upper middle-class ground’ (2003, 73); and because the first generation of leaders were predominantly middle-class Chinese who ‘had access to British university education immediately after the second world war’, subsequent generations already have privileged ‘access to the limited opportunities of learning the language’ (71). According to Chua, the meritocratic promise of postcolonial SSE was an illusion—the imposition of SSE on the populace enabled a Westernized Chinese- dominant elite class to reinforce its power. From Instrumentality to Identity…in Singapore Standard English JEREMY LIM 3 large majority of young Singaporeans who now use it freely in informal domains of talk. (2005, 64) The conviction that this ‘unplanned’ register should be celebrated as a symbol of identity is sometimes expressed in hyperbolic ways. In a widely cited TIME article, ‘A War of Words Over ‘Singlish’’, Tan Hwee Hwee distinguishes the ‘key ingredient in the unique melting pot that is Singapore’ from the internationally intelligible English that the SGEM promotes (2002, par. 6).2 Tan depicts Singlish as a gritty language rooted in the ‘unglamorous past’ of a nation ‘built from the sweat of the uncultured immigrants’ (par. 6). As the gustatory imagery in the article makes clear, Singlish is an irresistible cultural force in a city where skyscraping banks tower over junk boats; a city where vendors hawk steaming intestines next to bistros that serve haute cuisine. The SGEM’s brand of good English is as bland as boiled potatoes. If the government has its way, Singapore will become a dish devoid of flavour. (par. 6) Scholars do not recommend that SSE should be rejected completely; rather; they argue that Singaporeans should freely code-switch between instrumental SSE and identity Singlish. Paul Bruthiaux argues that variations ‘across varieties of English’ are ‘limited, often trivial’ (in learned and learnt, for example): in other words, the government should trust that Singaporeans can communicate effectively in a range of codes that spans the ‘continuum from standard English to Singlish’ (2010, 96). While a scholar like Bruthiaux highlights sociolectal continuities between SSE and Singlish, the Singapore government and SGEM supporters worry that many Singaporeans are not able to code-switch as effectively as privileged Singaporeans. In an article published in the local daily, The Straits Times, on 20 August 2008, ‘Don’t codeswitch to Singlish, please’, an SGEM supporter discourages fluent SSE speakers from code-switching. The concern was that ‘poor speakers’ might be misled into thinking there was ‘no need to increase their proficiency’ (par. 3). Likewise, in articles such as ‘Get your English right – even at kopitiam’ (Ng, My Paper) and ‘Getting it right – from the start’ (Low, The Straits Times), both published in September 2010, SGEM supporters write that Singapore needs role models to encourage fellow citizens, especially lower-class Singaporeans, to speak SSE. As reported in ‘Getting it right – from the start’, the SGEM chairman, Goh Eck Kheng, encourages SSE speakers to reach out to taxi drivers, store assistants, and food vendors working at kopitiams (food courts): in other words, the people who speak a variant that is ‘associated with a less educated group of Singaporean 2 On the SGEM website, we find archived official speeches publicizing the SGEM central tenet, that ‘Singapore will make itself more attractive to international investment, trade and tourism if its population can communicate effectively with outsiders’ in English (Bruthiaux 92-3). Examples of SGEM activities include the publication of conversations in newspapers, public performances at local, and the writing of a five-book series called Grammar Matters by the SEAMEO Regional Language Centre in Singapore. In the final section of this essay, I assert that SGEM activities in recent years are less driven by economic imperatives. From Instrumentality to Identity…in Singapore Standard English JEREMY LIM 4 speakers’ (Low 2010, par. 2-4). A non-Singaporean may question the effectiveness of such bossy statements, but the Singapore press is supervised for the purpose of guaranteeing ‘the effectiveness of the government’ and reinforcing ‘the government’s voice and the legitimacy of that voice’

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