Language politics and global city

Abstract

The state in Singapore has long insisted that Singaporeans be bilingual in English and an officially assigned ethnic mother tongue. English is to serve as the inter-ethnic lingua franca and facilitate economic competitiveness. The official mother tongue (Mandarin for the Chinese, Malay for the Malays, and Tamil for the Indians) is to serve as a cultural anchor for all the members of its associated ethnic group. Singapore's recent desire to establish itself as a global city, however, means that the social and linguistic order that the state has constructed on the basis of historically inherited ethnolinguistic affiliations and boundaries has to come to terms with a society that is opening up economically, culturally, and politically. The relationship between language and (ethnic) identity needs to be broadened so as to accommodate more diverse ethnolinguistic experiences. In this paper, I suggest that modernist assumptions informing Singapore's language policy need to be re-evaluated as the country attempts to re-invent itself as a global city, focusing on the implications for language education. I argue that citizenship as a form of reflexive defensive engagement is particularly useful if we are to comprehensively situate the complex state–society negotiations that characterize the politics of language in Singapore.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• global city
• late modernity
• mother tongue
• multiculturalism
• reflexivity

Notes

1. These terms are used interchangeably by Singapore's political leaders.

2. A survey by Tan (2005, p. 89) suggests that 27% of Singaporeans have considered emigrating.

3. The nation–state is idealized as constituted by ethnic homogeneity. This is of course a social construction. In Singapore's case, nation building involved “the construction of an identity which could accommodate ethnic and linguistic pluralism while simultaneously inculcating an overarching sense of nationhood” (Hill & Lian, 1995, p. 2).

4. For details, see the Singapore government's Immigration and Checkpoints Authority website on guidelines regarding the registration of “double-barrelled race”: http://www.ifaq.gov.sg/ica/apps/fcd_faqmain.aspx?qst=2fN7e274RApum1WYpN%2bPj5twN32vsMjYhbujfrdYJ3uVnk0y3Q; accessed 16 December 2013.