Dialect Use

Our favourite Singaporean English-language broadsheet has a front-page article on dialect use in China. The Chinese broadcasting authorities are concerned about the excessive use of dialect on television, and have introduced measures to vet programmes with dialect content. They expect programmes to be in Mandarin, or Putonghua, and frown upon dialect terms and accents seeping in to 'contaminate' the speech in broadcasts.

In this respect, China's broadcasters are moving in the opposite direction from other large broadcasting companies, which are increasingly embracing linguistic diversity. Where one might have heard only the crisp Received Pronunciation or BBC English on the World Service some years ago, one now hears a large range of twangs and tongues of accents Scottish to Jamaican. But where commercial broadcasters might want to diversify the sounds they transmit because of a conscious policy of representation or to increase regional viewership, the government broadcasting authority in China wishes to homongenise the language spoken in public for more complex reasons.

One important reason is political stability. China's size makes it appear monolithic in the eyes of external observers, but it has considerable cultural heterogeneity within its borders. Cultural differences may, in the fears of the central government, translate to sectarianism and provinces wishing to break away from Beijing's control. While it seems quaint when the Mandarins in Beijing object to Shanghainese TV shows, it is a more serious matter when Tibetans start speaking, well, Tibetan. The article quotes a Professor Shao Peiren of Zhejiang University, who says that 'the resurgence of dialects, abetted by broadcasters, is threatening national cohesion.' The use of the Minnan dialect as a badge of identity by the Taiwanese was then raised as an example of how dialects can be dangerous.

Another possibility is simply class and cultural prejudice. Mr Guan Xiang, a Cantonese coach from Guangdong feels that 'the message is that dialects are vulgar, backward, and undesirable.' With Mandarin being the speech of high officials, other dialects have long been seen as provincial and unsophisticated. This attitude has a long tradition, ironically emphasised by the Chinese government's insistence on calling Mandarin Putonghua, to maintain proletarian appearances and confound the impression that Mandarin is the speech of the elite.

So what does this have to do with Singapore's dialect policy? Our government's rationale is that dialect use will interfere with the learning of standard Mandarin Chinese by students in schools, should they speak one thing in school and then speak another at home. A secondary economic argument has been appended to the pedagogical one, that in doing business with China, a close knowledge of standard Putonghua is important, while dialect use would impair that.

Therefore, China's policy on dialects has no bearing on Singapore's, and one cannot be used to justify (by association) the other. China's language and cultural policy is based on interests of national unity, on the political need to maintain the system of centralised power. Dialects, being regional codes and by definition exclusive to outsiders, generate suspicion from those being excluded and are seen as being centrifugal forces. Singapore, on the other hand, wants to strike down dialect use because it has a negative impact on our ability to do business with other Chinese communities.

Personally, though, I feel that dialect use in Singapore should not be so closely regulated: dialect programming is virtually nonexistent on our TV and radio, being limited to a few specialist outlets, in particular cable Rediffusion radio. The danger of dialect overwhelming our ability to speak Mandarin Chinese is overstated: dialect use has been cut back so greatly that now it is primarily the older generation that can speak it. As some young local writers and poets have attested, being inconversant in dialect only widens the generational divide between youth and the elderly, limiting conversations to polite platitudes and a few stock phrases. This, of course, is contradictory to our social policy on the role of the family as the fundamental unit of society. More so than our bricks-and-mortar monuments, the unique assemblage of dialects in Singapore makes it Uniquely Singapore, something to be cherished and preserved, rather than swept under the carpet. Neither can we hope to rejuvenate dialect speaking in Singapore simply by importing teachers from the appropriate provinces in China. Our dialects have been enriched by borrowing from other languages, a direct testament to our multi-racial community. For instance, ba sha for market is not standard Chinese (that being shi chang) but a phonetic rendering of the Malay pasar. One might speak of using the jamban, and children are told to behave otherwise the mata might catch them. Borrowings have gone the other way, too, and both Malays and Chinese believe in the efficacy of doing things kongsi.

So much talk has been, well, talked about Singlish and how it is a badge of Singaporean identity. Here is another instance of something that could have only developed in Singapore, and it would be a national shame if we would let it disappear simply because of faulty philological instinct in considering Mandarin to be 'purer', or because of youth thinking it declasse to speak their dialect.