The language attitudes of bilingual youth in multilingual Singapore

Abstract

This paper is about the language attitudes that bilingual youth in Singapore have towards their Mother Tongue and English, and towards codeswitching between the two. The language attitudes of 443 primary school students were investigated using a variation of the matched-guise technique. Status and solidarity dimensions of attitudes, with ethnicity and socio-economic status as independent variables, were used in the analysis. The Chinese and Indian children's attitudes towards English on both attitudinal dimensions were found to be lower than their attitudes towards their Mother Tongue and codeswitching, while the Malay children expressed no significant difference. Children from lower socio-economic groups were found to have generally more positive attitudes towards all three languages than did those from the middle and upper socio-economic groups. The findings are discussed in relation to language ideology and policy in government discourse, as well as the children's own understanding of the meanings of language.

Keywords:

• bilingualism
• language attitudes
• Singapore
• socio-linguistic survey
• codeswitching
• language-in-education policy

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, and funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education, project numbers CRP22/04AL and CRP23/04/AL.