Speaking up for our mother tongue

By Clara Lee

GRAPHIC: DIANE LIM

When I was young, I remembered listening to my grandmother rattle off in Mandarin and struggling to decipher this strange and unfamiliar tongue.

Whenever she paused and looked at me expectantly, waiting for a response, I would turn to my mother for help.

“Ma, how do I say this in Mandarin?”

As I grew older, this became a common occurrence whenever I visited my grandparents.

Holding a proper conversation with my elderly grandparents became cumbersome because I always needed someone to play the role of a translator. To some extent, this also widened the generation gap that grew apparent at family gatherings.

This is problematic – when communication breaks down, so does the opportunity to pass on age-old cultural traditions and values. Stories of the elders get lost in translation.

This problem is not unique to my family. According to the Census of Population 2015, an official publication disseminating Singapore’s demographic and social data, usage of English as a home language was more prevalent among the younger age groups.

Among residents aged between five and 14, English was the language most frequently spoken at home for half of the Chinese and Indians here. For one out of four Malay individuals, English has also become the most frequently used language at home. This is a huge jump from the same survey conducted in 2005, where the figure was one in ten for the Malay population.

The English currency  

In a country as pragmatic as ours, it is not surprising that much has already been done to groom bilingualism among our youth.

For instance, students must take their mother tongue as a compulsory subject till they complete secondary school.

That said, students only need to get a minimum grade of D7 (which is below the passing grade) for Higher Mother Tongue at the O-level examination before they can chuck their dictionaries aside, and bid farewell to their tuition teachers.

Without much of an academic weightage in the first place, it seems like such a system only serves to arm our youth with the bare minimum, allowing us to sound just proficient enough to converse in our mother tongues. English, however, remains a preferred language spoken among young people here.

Preservation through education

But there is hope in knowing that steps toward a truly multilingual nation have been taken.  

Last year, the Ministry of Education (MOE) raised the funding for the Mother Tongue Language Learning and Promotion Committees from $12.5 million to $25 million.

The three councils representing the Chinese, Malay and Indian communities are now able to develop more long-term plans with funding for about 80 per cent of their programmes over the next five years. Initiatives that would focus on cultural and linguistic education for the young.

Of course, the mere increase in funds does not equate to concrete change.

On our end, we can also make it a point to expose ourselves more to our mother tongues, be it through books, television programmes or films.

We should also put in more effort to converse with our elders in our mother tongues – I believe they would have many interesting stories to share, if we just take the time to listen.

And when we see exchange students on campus that share our mother tongues, why not offer up a greeting in our common language? Perhaps a new friend can be made in the process.  

If we all put in the work, perhaps we can be optimistic about the future of our mother tongues after all.

For now, I will continue trying to remember the Mandarin phrases that my grandmother has been teaching me.

And the next time she asks me how have I have been, I’ll be sure to respond in Mandarin, “I have a lot to tell you, grandma.”