Lee Kuan Yew disliked the diversity of Singapore's many forms of Chinese
, a young Chinese Singaporean, learned that her grandmother was terminally ill, she signed up for a workshop in the Hokkien language run by LearnDialect.sg, a social enterprise founded to help Singaporeans communicate with the city-state’s older Chinese residents—including within their own families. Sandy is fluent in English and Mandarin, the official “mother tongue” of Chinese Singaporeans. Her grandmother spoke little of either.
Mandarin is a standardised version of the language spoken by the people of the vast plains of northern China. Yet hardly any of the Chinese from whom Singaporeans are descended hailed from there. They came instead from the southern provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan, and so spoke different languages: Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka, along with two Hokkien-related tongues, Teochew and Hainanese.
So dialects were disparaged. In the early 1980s television and radio programming in these languages all but disappeared, cutting many people adrift. “To speak dialect with your child,” the government warned, “is to ruin his future.” By the campaign’s own yardsticks, the success is striking. The use of Chinese vernaculars at home has collapsed, from 76% of Chinese households in 1980 to 16% in 2015. Over the same period, the use of Mandarin rose, from 13% of Chinese households to 46%.
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