Euan Toh
BA History
November 2022
What is the largest ethnic group in Singapore? Most Singaporeans are of Chinese descent, but to lump them all into one group as ‘Chinese’ greatly ignores the historical variance in heritage between the Chinese community. Yet that is exactly what has happened. To put it plainly, the Chinese of Singapore both in people and culture are similar, but not the same, as that of China. The majority would fall under the category Han Chinese, which is the overwhelmingly largest ethnic group in China, but when you break things down, the Han are a mix of different subgroups, and Chinese Singaporeans represent only a few of these groups.
Most Chinese Singaporeans can trace their ancestry specifically to two provinces in Southern China, Fujian and Guandong. The category used to describe the various group of migrants were ‘dialect’ groups, that people who came from a specific religion would speak a unique regional ‘dialect’. A ‘Chinese language’ does not exist, but rather they are a collection of languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese, that by virtue of shared ancestry, fall under the branch called ‘Sinitic’. To be clear, all these languages can still be broken down into distinct varieties. For example, ‘Hokkien’ is not one clear-cut language, it is instead the arbitrary combination of multiple ‘dialects’ that are found within the wider Fujian Province. In Singapore’s context though, Hokkien is very much an accepted ‘dialect’ of Chinese. If you dig deeper into the origins of Hokkien, which is categorised under the Min Chinese group, one thing that strikes you is just how ancient the language is compared to other Chinese ‘dialects’. The Mandarin word for chopsticks is pronounced ‘kuai zi’, the Cantonese word for chopsticks is pronounced ‘faai zi’, and in Hokkien the word for chopsticks is ‘ti’. Where most modern Chinese language groups are descended from Middle Chinese around the 10th Century CE, Min languages are related by an older common ancestor, Old Chinese, dating the split to be around the 3rd Century CE!
The Hokkiens came from Fujian province with a heritage as sailors, potentially even dashing pirates many centuries ago when the province was as lawless to the empire as the wild, wild west was to the United States or Sicily was to Italy. They made up the largest Chinese subgroup in Singapore. The Teochews came from Guandong and were the second-largest Chinese group. The Cantonese, also from Guandong, whose language is employed in Hong Kong, were the third-largest group. Many Cantonese women worked in construction and wore a distinctive red headgear, they were known as ‘samsui women’. The Hakka, whose language belongs to its own unique group within the Sinitic branch, were the fourth largest subgroup. The circular Chinese buildings you see in movies called ‘tulou’ were a product of Hakka architecture. There were also other ‘dialect’ groups, such as the Hainanese, famous for their cuisine, but the main ‘dialects’ that would become prevalent in Singapore were Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and Hakka.
There was a time when these ‘dialects’, especially Hokkien, flourished in Singapore. Most immigrants sailed in from Southern China, there were few native Mandarin speakers among them. Hokkien was especially widespread due to the majority of Chinese immigrants having native Hokkien fluency, and it was even used as a lingua franca, not only for Chinese communities but other minority groups as well. It was independence in 1965 when the existing order changed. As part of Singapore’s new education system, the government made the arguably intelligent decision to introduce a simplified bilingual language acquisition program in schools. The logic is simple. Singapore’s designated lingua franca was English, the colonial language. It paid dividends in easing the potential for global trade, the lifeblood of the island. It also was neutral among the major ethnic groups, Chinese, Malay and Indian. With this foundation, citizens of Singapore would speak both English and their ‘mother tongue’, the language of the ethnic group to retain their cultural identity. In schools across Singapore, the default was Mandarin for Chinese students, once again for pragmatic reasons, its economic potential is greater than the other ‘dialects’.
The problem with the original system was that a 1978 government report found that the success of bilingual education has been underwhelming. Less than 40% of students had what it deemed competency in two languages. Students of Mandarin were struggling significantly as Mandarin came across as a foreign language to them. There was no everyday use for it anyway, the lingua franca is English, and if you spending time with your family or close friends, you would just speak ‘dialect’. To achieve the goal of fluency in Mandarin, and to unite the Chinese population of Singapore, an active effort must be taken to erode the influence of the ‘dialects’.
The Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC) was first launched in 1979 and aimed to promote Standard Mandarin in place of the dialects. It was effectively an attack on the ‘dialects’, a punishment for their corrosive corruption of the neatly pruned bilingualism for the hearts and minds of Singapore’s Chinese youth. The original SMC slogan can be literally translated as ‘speak more Mandarin, speak less dialect’. Parents were encouraged to do just as such when speaking with their children. By the 1980s all traces of dialects in everyday life were being eliminated, and media was streamlined to be Mandarin oriented. Over time and generations, the prevalence of the ‘dialects’ vanished, and what remaining vestiges were carried by an ageing population.
The first complication to arise is the disconnect between younger and older generations. The discouragement of ‘dialect’ acquisition has led to a handicap in cross-generational communication. For the older generation whose formative years were spent in the pre-independence colony, Hokkien was the lingua franca, and maybe another ‘dialect’ was what was spoken at home. Imagine telling an ethnic French child to grow up speaking Portuguese while discouraging the simultaneous study of French. Then a few years later when the French grandparents, who have no grasp of Portuguese, come to visit, they struggle to communicate with the child, who has no familiarity with French. That is unless both parties have prior mastery of another language, perhaps Spanish, which is then used for communication. To those fortunate families that do get by with our own little lingua franca, good on us. Some families however are facing this very real problem of communication simply because of a short generational change in what was considered a practical language.
Another problem, arguably more sensitive, was the unintentional effect that strengthening Mandarin could have on weakening the lingua franca English. For ethnic minorities whose ‘mother tongues’ were not Mandarin, their dependence on English for cross-cultural communication would be challenged once the supermajority Chinese community could employ another language for everyday life. Certainly from personal experience working in a government sector that frequently interacts with the general public, many Chinese Singaporeans feel more comfortable speaking in Mandarin, which posed a challenge for my Malay and Indian colleagues. They become dependent on a colleague to assist in translation, which is both a testament to the multi-ethnic collaboration in the workplace as well as an unfortunate sign that such frequent recurrence of language barriers hindered the efficiency of our work.
Fortunately, the ‘dialects’, while declining in speakers, are far from dead. The SMC is not actively promoted anymore, and instead, a new wave of curiosity has emerged towards the ‘dialects’. Mandarin, while important and still the standard Chinese variant spoken across the Chinese population, is viewed as a ‘stepmother tongue’. The raw cultural roots lay in the ‘dialects’. Many clan associations still existing in Singapore offer language classes and other heritage activities for anyone interested in reconnecting with their roots. There is nothing in place to stop a person to walk into a clan house and say ‘I want to learn Hokkien/Teochew/Hakka’ etc. The ‘dialects’ as a lingua franca still survive in some small pockets of the country after all this time. Usually, in these communities, people would converse in a ‘dialect’, usually Hokkien, but are fluent in English or Mandarin.
Where do I fit in all of this? I grew up completely desensitized to my family’s use of Hokkien, it seems all my cousins have limited knowledge of it while our parents were always gossiping in unfamiliar tones. My own parents, brought up with Hokkien, could not even read Mandarin, a nurse had to write out my Chinese name for them when I was born. In school, we were always reminded ‘Chinese is our heritage’, but as you get older, you realise how reductionist that train of thought really is. We are so much more than just Mandarin, our entire background is of Southern Chinese descent. Yet we lost a defining aspect of that heritage, our language, which we failed to acquire while we were young. Nor do I bother to do as I said earlier, to walk into a clan house and ask to learn Hokkien. Indifference towards your own constructed identity can begin to creep in once you grow older. So what if I do not know the real ‘mother tongue’? I was blessed with a strong upbringing using English and my knowledge of Mandarin will certainly be more applicable than any of the ‘dialects’. I simply lived a life without a definitive understanding of my full heritage, and I don’t find myself incomplete because of that.
To further confirm my cynicism, a few months ago I was eating a meal with my paternal grandparents when I decided to probe them about their ethnic heritage, I wanted to hear from them myself what other colours of Chinese are in my blood. They shocked me and flipped the whole story on my head.
Grandmother: ‘I am Hakka but my family spoke Hokkien’
Grandfather: ‘My father is Hokkien and my mother is Hakka.
Since we speak Hokkien we just say we are Hokkien’
All this time my family ‘dialect’ Hokkien may not have even properly reflected our full historical origins. Personal heritage is a fickle subject, twisted and warped whether consciously or subliminally to fit an ideal. As stated above, sometimes culture can cancel one out, and construct itself accordingly to pragmatic circumstances. It remains such a wonder that the diversity of a person’s background can still be lumped as just a simplification of a much more complicated tapestry that spans across time and diversity.
Editor's note: This article, written by First-Year historian Euan Toh, was published as part of the 'Conflict and Heritage ' issue of the UCL History Journal in November 2022. Click here to read the full article!
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