“I’m a child of Lee Kuan Yew, cannot help it”: Students’ narratives on language and ethnic planning in Singapore

Abstract

This article examines the perceptions of young Singaporean university students on their country’s language policies and their own linguistic practices. The central objective of this text is to analyze the somewhat ambivalent discourses that these youths engage in when it comes to discussing the language policies implemented by their elders in Singapore. The discourses analyzed here express feelings that range from legitimization of the choices made by the first rulers of independent Singapore to resentment for creating artificial and essentialist categories which led to language loss, language shift and communicative barriers. Their testimonies also reveal that these students are aware of the ways languages and ethnicities have been commodified and instrumentalized towards both the manufacturing of the state and its national narrative. The article also examines how some Singaporean Chinese students position themselves critically vis-à-vis the homogeneous Chineseness that was imposed onto them via the post-independence Mandarin-only policy.