Diversity management and the presumptive universality of categories: the case of the Indians in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Increasing societal and linguistic diversity poses significant challenges to formative categories of language policies. We make this point via an examination of Singapore's management of its most linguistically diverse ethnic group, the Indians.

While heterogeneity has always been Singapore’s defining feature, the nature and scale of recent immigration have resulted in an unprecedented societal complexity. The government’s appreciation of this complexity among the Indians has led to a relaxation of the education policy by which five other Indian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu) serve as possible alternatives to Tamil (the officially assigned ethnic mother tongue). However, speakers from these other Indian language communities often prefer Hindi over alternatives. The growing prominence of Hindi illustrates that progressive policies can nonetheless be subverted by the very groups they seek to empower.

We analyze this policy predicament, tracing the roots of Singapore’s language policy to categories inherited from British colonialism. Consequently, contemporary tweaks to the policy leave unchallenged the presumptive universality of these categories. Calling for consistent attention to the situatedness and provenance of all categories (northern as well as southern), we close our paper with a description of what Singapore’s language policy vis-à-vis the Indian communities would look like from a decolonial perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Linguistic categories
• decolonial perspective
• Singapore
• Hindi
• diversity management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ritu Jain is a lecturer at the Language and Communication Centre, NTU. Her research and academic interest lies in the area of language management particularly as it pertains to the Non Tamil Indian Languages of Singapore. In her work, she has examined the role of the language education policy in the promotion and maintenance of Indian languages and the implications of the growing prominence of Hindi for the maintenance of minority Indian languages as well as intra-ethnic community harmony. In her current research project, she is studying the shift to English among the Indian language communities of Singapore.

Lionel Wee is Provost Chair Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include language policy, new varieties of English, and general issues in pragmatics and sociolinguistics. His latest book is The Singlish Controversy (Cambridge University Press). He is currently work (with Robbie Goh) on a book about the semiotics of affect in linguistic landscapes (Cambridge University Press, contracted).

ORCID

Ritu Jain http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4297-4319

Notes

1. In addition to being the official mother tongue of the Malay community, Malay is also the national language. But this national language status is mainly symbolic. Malay is used in the national anthem and in military commands, but there is no official obligation to learn the language. The emphasis instead is for each individual to learn the mother tongue assigned by the government as emblematic of the culture and identity of his/her ethnic community. There is consequently no language that strongly embodies a national identity, and cultural identification is instead supposed to be directed towards specific ethnic communities.

2. This speech was made in the context of the government urging Chinese Singaporeans to accept Mandarin as their official mother tongue. The same argument, mutatis mutandis, applies to the other official mother tongues.

3. The government has recently acknowledged that an increasing number of its citizens are of mixed ethnicities, and introduced a policy initiative as an attempt to deal with ethnolinguistic hybridity. With effect from 1 January 2011, the state decided to allow Singaporeans of mixed ethnicities to opt for double-barrelled or hyphenated ethnic identifications, such as ‘Chinese-Malay’ or ‘Malay-Indian’.

4. The states traditionally opposed to the elevation of Hindi as the national language of India.