The other mother tongues of Singaporean Indians

Jain, Ritu

doi:10.4324/9780429280146-5

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…A good example of this is to be found within the Indian community of Singapore. Faced with a more flexible Mother Tongue policy initiated in the 1990s allowing Indian pupils to chose a non-Tamil Indian language in school, families have nevertheless had the tendency to favour Hindi as a Mother Tongue over the Indian languages of their ancestral groups, as the national language of India is often valued as a more certain asset in a transnational and transmigrant perspective (Jain & Wee 2017;Jain 2021).…”

Section: Language For Economic Growthmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Forlot¹

2021

archipel

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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.

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Section: Language For Economic Growthmentioning

confidence: 99%