40 Asia The EconomistFebruary 22nd 2020
2Banyan Mandarins for Mandarin
W
hen sandy, a young Chinese Sin-
gaporean, learned that her grand-
mother was terminally ill, she signed up
for a workshop in the Hokkien language
run by LearnDialect.sg, a charity founded
to help Singaporeans communicate with
the city-state’s older Chinese residents—
including within their own families.
Sandy is fluent in English and Mandarin,
the official “mother tongue” of Chinese
Singaporeans. Her grandmother spoke
little of either. Before she died, Sandy
thrilled her by asking in Hokkien, “What
was your childhood like?” She was even
able to understand some of the answer.
Their language barrier was the pro-
duct of decades of linguistic engineering.
English has been the language of in-
struction in nearly all schools since 1987,
to reinforce Singapore’s global compet-
itive edge. But, depending on ethnicity,
pupils study a second language—typical-
ly Mandarin, Malay or Tamil. These are
intended, as Lisa Lim of the University of
Sydney puts it, to add “cultural ballast”
vis-a-vis English. In the case of Manda-
rin, its acquisition has been reinforced
by the government’s annual “Speak
Mandarin Campaign”, started in 1979.
Mandarin is a standardised version of
the language spoken by the people of the
vast plains of northern China. Yet hardly
any of the Chinese from whom Singapor-
eans are descended hailed from there.
They came instead from the southern
provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and
Hainan, and so spoke different lan-
guages: Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka,
along with two Hokkien-related tongues,
Teochew and Hainanese.
The Speak Mandarin Campaign
sought to destroy Chinese Singaporeans’
real mother tongues, first by demeaning
them as provincial “dialects” of Manda-
rin when they are in fact mutually unin-telligible languages as different as English,
German and Danish. Lee Kuan Yew, Singa-
pore’s founding father, who started learn-
ing Chinese in his 30s, promoted the now
discredited notion that humans have a
tightly limited capacity for language:
Hokkien and all the rest undermined the
official bilingualism by hogging chunks of
children’s memories. Further, the great
tidier disliked the diversity embodied in
these languages and wanted to forge a
single Chinese identity—reason enough to
foist on Chinese Singaporeans an alien
language. Lee also thought that China’s
opening promised riches to those who
could speak its official language.
So dialects were disparaged. In the early
1980s television and radio programming in
these languages all but disappeared, cut-
ting many people adrift. “To speak dialect
with your child,” the government warned,
“is to ruin his future.” By the campaign’s
own yardsticks, the success is striking. The
use of Chinese vernaculars at home has
collapsed, from 76% of Chinese house-
holds in 1980 to 16% in 2015. Over the same
period, the use of Mandarin rose, from 13%of Chinese households to 46%. But the
linguistic engineering has had an unin-
tended consequence: the use of English
is now increasing faster, especially
among younger families: over 70% of
households with children at primary
school use it as their main language,
undermining Mandarin and vernaculars.
And so a debate about the costs of
language policies has grown since Lee’s
death in 2015. The same year, the 50th
anniversary of the nation’s founding was
accompanied by an outpouring of sen-
timentality over Singapore’s roots. These
days officials are a bit readier to tolerate
Singapore’s linguistic variety. Lee Kuan
Yew once called Singlish, the country’s
vibrant mash-up of English, Malay and
Chinese vernaculars, a “handicap”. Lee’s
son, the prime minister, Lee Hsien
Loong, claims to be proud of Singapore’s
unique form of Mandarin. For instance,
the Malay for “market”, pasar, has been
imported as ba sha. That would be unin-
telligible to a mainland Chinese. Yet that
only highlights a paradox Mr Lee does
not acknowledge. On the one hand, he
praises Singaporean Mandarin because it
supposedly reinforces a Chinese Singa-
porean identity. On the other, he frets
about others stealing a march in China
because of their more fluent Mandarin.
Meanwhile, younger Singaporeans
are embracing former mother tongues.
Ski Yeo and Eugene Lee were motivated
to found LearnDialect.sg upon seeing an
elderly Cantonese-speaker in a nursing
home struggle to communicate that she
was cold. Health workers have signed up
to their courses, while others want to say
the right things at family gatherings over
the lunar new year. There is an uptick in
Hokkien television programming. And
everyone admits that effete Mandarin is
useless for swearing.Whatever happened to Singapore’s real mother tongues?The stand-off comes at an awkward
time. Eighteen months of talks between
America and the Taliban in Qatar appear to
be on the verge of bearing fruit. The two
sides say they are close to resurrecting a
deal called off by President Donald Trump
last year. Any agreement is likely to require
the government to start negotiating very
quickly with the Taliban to decide how the
country should be run.
That will be hard if there are two com-
peting governments. Political heavy-
weights are already jockeying to be part of
the negotiating team. A weakened MrGhani will struggle to adjudicate. It will be
hard for the government to negotiate force-
fully with the Taliban if it does not have the
backing of most of the political class. “The
challenge is to get a united and inclusive
negotiating team together,” explains a for-
eign diplomat. “It would be a very poor sit-
uation if the Taliban and the ussign their
agreement, only for the Afghans to fail.”
In the meantime, the economy is falter-
ing. Poverty is on the rise. Some 9.4m Af-
ghans will need charitable food and shelter
this year, the United Nations warns, up
from 6.5m in 2019. In the southern city ofKandahar, an economy once super-
charged by vast injections of aid is now
subdued. Residents bemoan a lawlessness
epitomised by assassinations of business-
men and government officials. The disput-
ed election result compounds the pro-
blems, says Muhammad Naim Kharakhi, a
shopkeeper at the main bus station, who
sells biscuits and drinks to passengers. “It
will cause big problems for ordinary people
because businessmen who want to invest
will wait. The economic situation was al-
ready bad enough because of the delayed
result. This will only make it worse.” 7