Tamil Language Policy in Singapore:
the Role of Implementation.
H. Schiffman
South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Forthcoming in Viniti Vaish and Liu Yongbing
(eds.)
Language, Capital, Culture:
Critical Studies of Language in Education in
Singapore.
Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
Introduction. The question of language
policy implementation is one that is typically thought of as problematical in
some way—sometimes referred to as the ‘Achilles’ Heel’ of language policy—since
the failure of a language policy to have the outcomes that language planners
wish can often be attributed to poor implementation of the policy. Frequently, language policy makers are
novices at language planning, and tend to view it as something that can be, or
should be, easily implemented--a few
‘broad strokes’ to give the basic outlines of the policy, and one is done. I however tend to see implementation as the most problematical area of language
planning, since it involves many details—deciding on concrete steps, the allocation
of financial resources, devising timetables
for completion, evaluation and cross-checking—and it may also involve a ‘long
view’ of the process that may not outlast the impatience of politicians seeking
‘quick fixes’ for a problem. As far as
the implementation of language policy in Singapore is
concerned, especially as it concerns the Tamil language, I have recently come
to the conclusion that many of the problems with Tamil language maintenance
have to do with problems of implementation, and not with other issues.
Language Policy in Singapore. Language
policy in Singapore is well-documented,
and for scholars familiar with bilingual education, the system needs little or
no introduction. I characterized the situation of Tamil in Singapore in a
previous study as follows:
‘The Singapore educational system supports a well-developed and comprehensive
bilingual education program for its three major linguistic communities on an
egalitarian basis, so Tamil is a sort of “test-case” for how well a small
language community can survive in a multilingual society where larger groups [Chinese
and Malay] are doing well. But Tamil is acknowledged by many to be facing a
number of crises; Tamil as a home language is not being maintained by the
better-educated, and Indian education in Singapore is also not living up to the
expectations many people have for it. Educated people who love Tamil are upset
that Tamil is becoming thought of as a “coolie language” and regret this very
much. Since Tamil is a language characterized by extreme diglossia, there is
the additional pedagogical problem of trying to maintain a language with two
variants, but with a strong cultural bias on the part of the educational
establishment for maintaining the literary dialect to the detriment of the spoken one (Schiffman 2003:105).
Implementation and Language Policy. Implementation in language policy consists of
the measures (plans, strategies, timetables, mechanisms…) that provide the
authoritative backbone (including financial rewards and resources) to
achieve the goals of the language policy, and the motivation to use the language
by the people affected. Some people refer to this as ``Carrot and Stick",
the ‘carrot’ being the rewards and incentives, and the ‘stick’ being the
enforcement: the disincentives or
penalties. Implementation may also be highly
dependent on funding, which is always a sticky issue. In study after
study of language policies, various scholars point out that no matter how
benign or enlightened a language policy may be in its form, it needs to be
implemented carefully or it will certainly fail to achieve the outcome its
planners intended. Implementation is
then simply the plan by which a policy is to be put into practice—the steps
that will be taken, the bodies or organs of the state that will take these
steps, the resources (funding, publication, whatever) that are available for
the policy, and the timetable or calendar according to which various aspects of
the plan will be expected to take effect. Carefully constructed policies may
also involve evaluation, i.e. a way to check periodically to see if the policy
is being implemented as planned, and if not, what measures can be taken to
rectify the shortcomings.
Review of the Literature. The
literature on language policy implementation is vague and somewhat
dispersed; much of it is embedded in
more general studies of language policy, and there are also some differences
in emphasis, such as whether the policy
and planning have to do with the corpus of the
language or its status in a particular society.
The task of studying problems of implementation can also be made more
complex by the fact that language planning bodies or others concerned with
language policy often confuse corpus planning and status planning. Studies of the ‘problem’ of implementation seem to boil
down to two issues, both involving motivation: the reluctance of people
(organizations, their staff members, officers of the government…) to carry out
the mandate they have been tasked with, and the reluctance of speakers of
particular languages to accept the conditions that planners have specified for
their community. Studies of the former
(the organizations) are more numerous than studies of the latter (members of
the linguistic community), but it is the latter that is at issue in the Tamil
situation in Singapore. The most useful studies
for our purposes are Grin 2003, who looks at language policy implementation in
the European Union; Cobarrubias and Fishman 1983 contains a number of
studies—Cobarrubias 1983; Haugen 1983, which focuses on Norway; Barnes 1983, on
the implementation of the use of Putonghua and PinYin in China, and Lewis 1983,
on the implementation of language planning in the former Soviet Union.
Fierman
1995 looks at implementation problems in Uzbekistan since
the collapse of the Soviet Union, while
Daoust-Blais 1983 (also in Cobarrubias and Fishman 1983) details the complex
issues of the implementation of status changes in French Canada. In most of
these studies, the issue involves a change in status of a language that has not
been used for certain functions, but subsequently is called upon to be used in
additional domains, usually because of some mandate from a higher authority,
rather than simply because its speakers wish to change something. In other
words, this is mostly top-down change in
status. As Daoust-Blais details, the Canadian federal government mandated
status changes for French, but it fell to the government of Québec to make
these changes happen in that province, and in provinces in English Canada where
there was no popular pressure to do so, changes did not occur.
But
as she also points out, mixed in with the status issues were corpus issues,
which involved perceptions about what
kind of French should have the higher status being legislated, and ideas
about what was ‘good’ French (or what kind of French deserved to be given high
status) often involved perceptions that Canadian French was ‘low’ in status,
and metropolitan French was higher. Thus, corpus issues can not always be
divorced from status issues. Mackey (1983) also pointed out the problems the
Canadian government experienced in attempting to change the ‘basic
geolinguistic equation’ by using what he refers to as ‘behavior-modification’
techniques, which largely failed.
Here was a government which, in the early 1960s, set
out to prevent the country from splitting into two nations. And it did so by legislating the status of
French in Canada to a position equal to that of English, and of placing the
implementation of the language policy over all other priorities of the federal
jurisdiction. Because of the limits of their jurisdictions however the success
of the language policy had to depend on whether the rest of English-speaking
provinces would follow suit. None of them did. (Mackey 1983:198).
Theva-Rajan
(1995) similarly recounts the many failures to implement the 16th
Amendment to the Sri Lanka
constitution,
whereby Tamil became a ‘national’ language. Again and again, provisions
allowing the use of Tamil for various purposes, including in Parliament itself,
failed because inadequate resources—clerks and interpreters trained in Tamil,
provision of Tamil typewriters, and just plain foot-dragging, buck-passing, finger-pointing
and obfuscation—stymied the implementation of this linguistic right.
In the early days of language planning, it was pointed out
by some authors that implementation was or would be a problem, but when one
looks for studies that demonstrate the success or failure of implementation,
they are few and far between. It is
easier in fact to find, in hindsight, indications of failure, so the literature
on the early years of language policy in independent India (Khubchandani 1983,
Schiffman 1996), point to the shortcomings of implementation as the reason for
India’s disastrous language policy failures in the mid 1960’s, including
violent resistance to the imposition of Hindi. Khubchandani, in fact,
reveals a general cultural lèse-magesté in Indian governmental
planning, such that many policies are weak in this area.
A different perspective is provided by Grin (2003), who
cites Fishman’s graded intergenerational
disruption scale (GIDS; Fishman 1991) as a metric by which we can evaluate
the linguistic vitality of a minority language, and then points out that
conditions have to be met if a minority language is going to be used by its speakers. Though Grin is focusing on regeneration or
reviving a language (especially minority languages within the European Union, rather than on maintaining a language that is
somewhat threatened), we can readily see from the conditions that he lays out that
the Tamil language in Singapore, spoken by about 60% of the Indian population,
which itself represents about 7% of Singapore’s population, is in a very
precarious position, and one of our tasks here will be to determine whether
mere ‘fairness’ or ‘equal treatment’ under the law in Singapore is enough to
keep Tamil alive, given the huge preponderance of Chinese speakers on the one
hand, and the option of English on the other.
Status and Corpus. In the
Tamil case, in Singapore (as well as in India or elsewhere) the linguistic culture favors the notion that if
any kind of Tamil should have high status, and be used as one of Singapore’s
official language, Literary Tamil is the
variety that should have this status, and the spoken Tamil (ST) that children
speak at home and bring into the classroom does not deserve the status. Thus,
issues of corpus and status are inextricable in Singapore (or
indeed wherever Tamil is used), and the implementation of a language policy
involving Tamil involves both kinds of planning, although the tendency is to
focus on the corpus and not the status.
The
fact that the language policy toward Tamil is in some sense anti-Tamil is
totally ignored by those who control what kind of Tamil will be taught, i.e.
the Curriculum Development Board, controlled by the Ministry of Education. This
policy is anti-Tamil because it denigrates the home variety, which is the
actual ‘mother tongue’ of the Tamil community, and
attempts to replace it with a variety never used for authentic communication by
Tamils anywhere. I have detailed elsewhere (Schiffman 2003) what kinds of
injury this excessive purism does to Tamil language maintenance in Singapore, because
of what it does to the perceptions of Tamil speakers about their language
competence, and what ‘mother-tongue’ language study is for in Singapore. In case after case, students and others
interviewed about this variety declare it to be totally useless, of no economic
value, and in many cases, of no value whatsoever—it is seen merely as a hurdle
to be overcome in the process of gaining entrance to higher education in Singapore. It is
safe to say that younger Tamils have no sense of ‘ownership’ of the Tamil
language, since they cannot use it in creative ways, such as to coin new
terminology the way speakers of English can and do. Puristic corpus regulation, as I have tried
to show (Schiffman 2003) shuts down certain natural avenues of word-formation
processes used universally by other natural languages, and
allows only word-formation by combining ‘native’ roots with suffixes, usually
also involving loan-translation. Thus
natural vocabulary development such as Tiivii
or paDapoTTi for ‘television’, are
disallowed, and only loan translations (tolaikaaTci
or tolainookki) are permitted. The
latter are also ‘top-down’ constructs, involving no participation by actual
users of the language, and therefore used by no speakers of the language except
officials in the broadcast media.
The failure of implementation. Why then
do I see this as a failure of implementation, rather than a failure of some
other aspect of language planning? Implementation is the hardest element of
language planning because it involves anticipating unforeseen difficulties and
working out solutions to them, once identified.
As with language planning in general, the attempt to make Singaporeans bilingual in
English and their ‘mother tongue’ has had unintended
consequences, and one of these is surely the consequence of language shift
(to English) which is found to some extent among all mother-tongue communities
in Singapore.
Given the high economic value of
English, and the lesser value of other languages, this is not surprising; but
this tendency has been evident for some time, and little has been done to try
to rectify it. It is often condemned as a
failure of ‘will’ among the younger generation, and surely motivation and attitude
are part of the problem. Since mother-tongue education is used for ‘moral’
education, failure to embrace the language can be seen (by some Singapore
Tamils) as a moral failure.
Whether or not this is the perception, there
is at best a failure of will—a perception (by younger Singaporeans) that the
policy is useless, that they have no ownership of the Tamil language, and that therefore
they have no stake in it. But instead of condemning them for their
lack of ‘love of the language,’ perhaps some measures could be taken, or could
have been taken, to rectify this. Failure to do so, and to simply issue
condemnations, is therefore a failure of the policy, because it means that an
unintended outcome is being ignored, and corrective measures are not being
taken. This is clearly a failure of
implementation, therefore, since implementation involves among other things,
doing periodic evaluations—checks to see how the policy is working, and if it
is not working as planned, to make course corrections. Of course the policy of focusing on a
puristic standard has meant that some students do obtain 5 A-level passes, but
this misses the point of language maintenance.
My
assessment of the value of stakeholders’ views has been reinforced by my recent
discovery of the work of Tom Tyler, a psychologist who, together with his
associates, studies policy-making from the point of view of the degree to which
participants in various situations assess the fairness of a policy. Their assessment of fairness is based largely
on their perception of whether they have adequately participated in the
construction of the policy (Lind and Tyler, 1988; Blader and Tyler, 2000;
Tyler, Darley and Messick 2001 ). Tyler and his
associates’ research on policy participation and policy success shows that
individuals tend to perceive that policies are fair, not if outcomes of the policy are fair and
equitable, but whether they have been adequately consulted in the process of
constructing the policy. As he puts it
(Tyler 2001)
Recent
studies conducted within political, legal and managerial organizations suggest
that authorities can gain deference for their decisions by making these
decisions in ways that people will judge to be fair. […] Thibaut and Walker
[1975] originally encouraged the study of procedural justice because they felt
it suggested a way for authorities to bridge differences in interests within
conflict situations and create decisions that all parties to a dispute would
willingly accept. This hopeful, optimistic vision of the power of procedural
mechanisms has been supported strongly by research findings. (Darley, Messick
and Tyler 2001:5).
This
research has been carried out in a number of different organizations, both governmental
and for-profit, and my discovery of this work caused me to begin to think of
its ramifications for language policy formation. The term ‘gaining deference
for decisions’ means that stakeholders
‘buy into’ the policy and cooperate with it, increasing its acceptance and
effectiveness. My first reaction to this is that very few polities consult with
the speakers of their language(s) when they set about to formulate their
language policies, so language policy formation is somehow exceptional in this
regard. Even in
societies where language policy formation is thought of as more ‘democratic’,
the policy rarely involves consultation, so language policy formation seems to involve
a ‘father knows best’ kind of approach.
Policies range themselves along a continuum from more democratic (i.e.,
perceived as fair, even if not consultative) to less fair and more autocratic
(and definitely not consultative). The latter type is typical of France, the
former Soviet Union, and some others, though
France and the former Soviet Union differ on whether minorities see the policy
as fair, since Soviet policy empowered linguistic minorities, whereas French language
policy disempowers them.
Singapore is
certainly an example of a polity where language policy has been constructed
from a ‘top-down’ perspective, with little or no consultation with its
citizens, i.e. the parties involved. Singapore Tamils, when asked about the
policy, however, generally state that the policy, as far as it applied to Tamil,
is a good one, because in contrast with, for example, Malaysia, where
Tamil has no official status, Singapore’s policy
seems generous and well-intentioned.
Singaporeans from all mother-tongue groups seem to think that the
language policy is fair. Each community—Chinese, Malay, Indian—is treated in a
fair and equal way, even though the numerical imbalance of the population
groups tends to work against certain kinds of fairness in outcomes. Furthermore, since the place where the policy
is most obviously enacted is the educational system, Singaporeans tend to think
that their school system appears to try to handle the language situation fairly.
They therefore conclude that this makes the implementation
of the policy seem fair. Why, then,
do Singapore Tamils not like the outcome, if it treats all mother-tongue groups
equally? Perhaps the answer lies in the kind of conclusions Tyler is
drawing—that the policy has been constructed without input from the
stakeholders, and the values they hold about the usefulness of the languages
they are offered. In Bourdieu’s terms, there is a difference in the ‘cultural
capital’ attributed to the various languages involved, and for Tamils, English
has the cultural capital they value, and Tamil does not. (Bourdieu 1982). As he points out, people see language as a
tool that allows them to improve their lifestyle, obtain a better marriage
partner or a better job, and policy as handed down from above has little to do
with the decisions they make—their main motivation is economic, and this is
what young Tamil speakers will also say.
The goal of this paper, then, is show that the implementation
of language policy is actually more complex than it appears to be at first
glance, and the problems with the Tamil language in Singapore—mainly
seen as a problem of language maintenance—are
actually problems of implementation. I
will try to tie this in with Tyler and his associates’ discoveries about what
makes policies actually work, or appear to work, which he and his colleagues
show to be something of a psychological or
motivational issue, rather than being
merely an issue of incentives and disincentives, especially of the financial
kind. It is also clearly a ‘cultural capital’ issue, in the sense that Bourdieu
describes.
Status and Corpus Planning. One must,
as we have already mentioned, distinguish between status planning and corpus
planning; some of the early literature on language policy implementation (e.g.
Haugen 1966) focused on planning for the ‘corpus’ (the form of the language) rather
than on status, and the search for studies of implementation of status change has resulted in few useful
resources. As already mentioned, various
polities often tend to confuse corpus and status planning, or fall back on one
when energy for the other is what is needed. Thus in France, for example, there
is a tendency to see the ‘defense’ of the French language as the defense of the
purity, orthography, or lexicon of the French language, rather than as measures
that might reinforce the status of
French.
Tamils in Singapore, as I have indicated elsewhere, also fall back on corpus
concerns since the status of the language does not seem to them to be under the
control of the Tamil community—it is determined by the Singapore government,
which has left the corpus issues to the Tamil community, which then devotes all
its energy to battling issues of lexical purity. Thus even in India, where Tamil has no status
problems in Tamilnadu, Tamils still rail against the invasion of Hindi and the
corrupting influence of Sanskrit, which are corpus
issues, not status issues. This mania about corpus policy may have carried
over to Singapore,
since Singapore Tamils tend to do what Tamils know how to do best—the care and
feeding of ‘pure’ Tamil.
Successful
Implementation. A language policy can be seen to be carefully implemented
if laws are passed to make the language ‘official’, and beyond this if steps
are taken to teach and use the language in education, to appropriate funds for
schools, for the training of teachers, for the publication of textbooks; and if
a switch-over from one language to another is planned, a timetable according to
which the switch is to (gradually) take place. There may need to be an
authority that oversees this, with carefully-trained personnel who keep track
of the implementation. Evaluation, in this system, might involve checking to
see if the policy actually produces bilinguals (if bilingualism is the goal),
or biliteracy (if that is the goal). As
Daoust-Blais points out (1983:216) attempts to change the status of French in
Canada from the original legislative attempts in 1961 became more and more
focused on status as time went on, and each successive piece of legislation to
promote French in Québec was more status-oriented, shifting from focus on
personal status to one of territorial status, from bilingualism to French
monolingualism, from providing incentives to becoming actually coercive.
As Eastman (1983) has
pointed out, language planning is necessarily future-oriented, meaning that plans are made in the present for
certain things to be accomplished in the future. If plans are not made, or if funds are not
made available, and if teachers or administrators or school boards are not held
accountable for sticking to a timetable, language policies will fail to be
implemented.
Carrot and Stick. Typically, implementation involves having
both incentives built-in to a policy which will reward people in some way for
following the plan in question, and also disincentives (or punishments) when
the plan is not followed. This is known
popularly as ‘carrot and stick’ and it is well-known that some people follow a
plan if they see that there are rewards in it for them personally, while others
require some kind of punishment or disincentive if they do not follow the
guidelines. Many citizens of a society
are law-abiding, and will stop their car at a stoplight at 3:00 a.m. even when nobody is watching, and no other
traffic is approaching; others need to be constantly watched so that they do
not violate the law. Tyler et al.’s
work, among others, shows that if people believe rules and regulations are
fair, especially if they perceive that they have been arrived at in a fair and impartial manner, they will support them
and follow them, and will not require disincentives. Rewarding them in some way may also help, and
for some people the ‘carrot’ is more important than the stick. But if policies are not seen to be fair, and
if rewards and incentives are not present, people will not do their part to see
that the policy is carried out, and policies will then fail. In other words, stakeholders have to cooperate with policies in order for
them to succeed, and this is what is often lacking in more authoritarian
policies. People can pay lip-service and
pass the buck (Theva-Rajan 1995) but actual cooperation is more difficult to
elicit, unless, as Tyler et al. show, citizens perceive the policy to be fair.
Thus if a policy decision involves changing which language
is to be used for various purposes or in various domains in a particular polity,
such as the attempts begun in Canada in the 1960’s to put French on a more
equal basis in all of Canada’s provinces (and not just the traditional
French-speaking provinces), teachers and government servants at all levels need
to see the fairness of this policy in order to make sure that it is
implemented. If not, the policy will fail, or will take longer to
implement. One of the incentives that
has worked in Canada, but was surely not one that was planned, was that
middle-class English Canadians began to see the advantage of having their
children enrolled in ‘French Immersion’ classes, which led, at least among this
level of Canadian society, to a greater acceptance of the French language in
all of Canada’s provinces (Lambert 1960).
French immersion was seen by these people as a kind of ‘perk’ or ‘feather in
the cap’ that gave them and their children certain psychic rewards, as well as
down-to-earth rewards, such as smaller classes, special status, more parental
involvement, and so on, at very little cost to them. Since not all children
succeed in immersion bilingualism, success in the system delivers certain psychic
rewards not available to parents whose children are successful.. Immersion bilingual education accords high status
to the families that participate, and at very little cost.
But this psychic reward has not been enough to make bilingual education an
across-the-board phenomenon in all of English Canada, so acceptance of
bilingualism across the board remains an elusive goal.
Problems of
Implementation. As should now be
obvious the point of this paper is to show that implementation in language
policy is its weakest element, and that implementation has many hidden
pitfalls. It is also my goal to show that the problems with implementation of
mother-tongue programs in Singapore, especially those for Tamil, are problems
that have arisen because the policy contains assumptions about bilingual
education that have not been tested,
because they are believed by policy-makers to be true, and if they actually had
allowed for testing and evaluation of the policy as implemented, they would
perhaps have different outcomes.
It is one thing for a policy on, say, immigration,
controlled substances, or foreign monetary
transactions to have problems, and for there to be swift and effective measures
taken to solve the problem. If someone is violating the rules, they can be
rounded up; foreign banking transactions can be monitored through bank records,
or electronically. And governments
generally entrust these issues to people trained to deal with them. But with
language policy, often enacted or formulated by novices, how shall language
policy violations be dealt with? In
Nazi-occupied Alsace during World
War II, people who spoke French in public were deported to the 'interior' of France,
and Québec is famous for its ‘language police’ who look for violations of the
language laws? The easiest (though not
perhaps the best) way to control language policy, it turns out, is to use it as
a barrier to educational advancement—control access to university by
standardized test scores, such as the Cambridge A-levels, or the American
SAT’s. Thus if people fail the tests,
they should be content to accept lower status jobs that do not require higher
status education.
Unwarranted
Assumptions. What are some of the
unwarranted assumptions that underlie language policy in Singapore,
and why are they problematical? The most
obvious are the following:
1. The
assumption that omniscient leaders can make decisions about language policy, without
much consultation with citizens, teachers, or any other interested parties,
about their needs and desires.
2. The
assumption that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy will work for a small minority
like the Tamils as effectively as it will work for the dominant Chinese-descent
group. That is, if the policy is working for larger groups, and they are happy,
the small ones should be happy, too
3. The
assumption that Singaporeans are monolingual, or have only one ‘fixed’
mother-tongue, and that it is something other than English.
4. The
assumption that teaching ‘moral’ education through the ‘mother tongue’ will
result in the retention of ‘indigenous Asian moral values’ and stave off
undesirable western values, which would otherwise inundate Singapore society if
English were used for moral education.
5. The
assumption that separating bilingualism by subject matter, and teaching ‘hard’
subjects (math, science, etc.) in English, and ‘soft’ subjects (‘moral’
education, literature) in the ‘mother tongue’ will result in balanced
bilingualism, and not language shift.
6. The
assumption that exonormic standards for all of Singapore’s
languages can be used with impunity for language maintenance purposes, and that
there is no need to bolster the domains of L-variety languages.
7. The
assumption that L-variety languages have no value as a resource to underpin the
teaching of H-variety (exonormic) standard languages, and can be (in fact should be) ignored.
8. The
assumption that Singapore identity is associated with some ineffable ‘higher’
values transmitted by the mother-tongue, instead of residing, for most younger
Singaporeans, in the less prestigious Singlish they all know.
The first assumption above may be
among the more controversial, so let me give examples from Lee Kuan Yew’s chapter in his recent autobiography:
From
Chapter 11 “Many Tongues, One Language.”
·
“Not wanting to start
a controversy over language, I introduced the teaching of three mother
tongues, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, into English schools. […] To balance this, I introduced the
teaching of English in Chinese, Malay, and Tamil schools.” (p. 146).
·
“I left the
Chinese representatives in no doubt that I would not allow anyone to
exploit the Chinese language as a political issue. That put an end to their
attempts to elevate the status of the Chinese language.” (p. 147).
·
“After I deported
the Malaysian leaders of the two demonstrations, student agitation diminished.”
(p. 147)
·
“I decided to
make English the language of instruction at Nantah.” (p. 150)
·
“After the two
universities were merged, I made all Chinese schools switch to English
as their main language of instruction, with Chinese as their second language.”
(p. 152).
And so on: the first person pronoun “I” is the
dominant pronoun here—not “I consulted with X and with Y” or “We decided to
allow X and Y to vote” but “I did this and I did that”. My claim that language policy decision-making
is autocratic and ‘top-down’ is based on this kind of statement. I am not claiming that it is dictatorial or
Stalinistic, or that opponents to the policy were locked up, or deported, (although he does say he deported Malaysian
leaders), but that there was not much consultation then, and the consultation
that does take place now is behind closed doors, rather than in an open
consultative way, as discussed by Tyler.
As for the rest, I consider these assumptions to be
unwarranted, or at least unverifiable, because they seem to be fundamental to Singapore’s
language policy without any evidence given for their being true. In academia,
we do not believe claims made in published research unless evidence is
presented, based on empirical investigation. As I point out below,
German-American church groups in the 19th century US
had similar
assumptions, also untested, about the value of using German to teach religious
subjects, a strategy designed to maintain German as a language of religion, but which turned out to be untested and unverifiable. Instead of resulting in bilingualism, this
policy resulted in language shift. In 19th century America,
with no research on bilingualism to consult, one can understand why such a
mistake might be made; in the 20th century, there was less of an
excuse. Underlying all of these
assumptions is the one that assumes that language policy can be formulated by
people with little knowledge of how it works, and that the desired outcomes
will result.
From studies such as Gopinathan et al. (1994, 1998) we can
see, sometimes reading between the lines, that attempts are constantly being
made to evaluate the policy, but not to challenge its basic assumptions; this
is not to fault such studies, but rather to fault the assumptions, which in a
top-down decision-making system like Singapore, cannot be challenged with
impunity.
Instead, the existing system is constantly tinkered with—ever more complex
levels, tracks, bypasses, ‘quick fixes’, are introduced, without dealing with
the basic assumptions.
How endangered is
Tamil in Singapore? According to Fishman’s graded
intergenerational disruption scale (GIDS), an eight-point scale of
endangerment, with stage 8 the point of no return, Tamil can be located at
Stage 4, “where the regional or minority language gains some official
recognition and moves into mainstream formal education.” This stage presupposes
that the minority language is actually used in the home and is transmitted
intergenerationally, which is true for Tamil (and indeed other languages in Singapore)
to some extent, but as we know from other studies, Tamil may indeed be lacking
this support in many Singapore
homes. But what is important here would be to
determine whether measures taken by the Singapore state to strengthen the
domains of Tamil, such that it moves up the ranks, e.g. to Stage 1, which is
the highest level of vitality, or whether other measures taken by the state
actually weaken the support for
Tamil,
without appearing overtly to have any relationship to language maintenance.
Grin goes on to state that for minority languages to be
used, there must be ‘capacity, opportunity and desire’
to do so. This is where problems with
Tamil maintenance in Singapore
appear most strongly, because while the school system gives children the capacity to use the language, they need opportunities to do so, and with the lack
of a territorial domain for Tamil, and given the small size of the population, opportunities
are few and far between. And finally, desire, the weakest link. When Tamils are interviewed on this issue,
we find that little incentive to use the language exists. The language has no economic value, and other
opportunities to actively use it are few and far between—even religious use may
be largely a matter of passive observation of religious practices, especially
in Hinduism.
Since young people lack also the incentive or opportunity to create their own
slang the way teenagers in other linguistic cultures do, they are forced either
to speak like their elders,
or simply opt out of using the
language. As Grin puts it,
“Typically, minority language speakers
are bilingual. This implies that in
principle, they have a choice to carry out their various activities through the
medium of the majority language or of
the minority language. If there is a choice, one of the conditions for the
choice to be made in favour of ‘doing things through the medium of the minority
language’ is therefore people’s desire (or
willingness) to do so.” (Grin
2003:44)
As Grin goes on to say, minority language speakers are more dependent
on the state (than are majority language speakers) to provide for the three
conditions of capacity, opportunity and desire to be present. Here is where things begin to get troublesome:
Grin feels that the state needs to be sure desire
is facilitated, but most polities I am aware of see this as something the
minority language community needs to recognize for itself, and that it is not the task of the Singapore
state to provide motivation to its
minorities. In the Tamil community, as
far as I am aware, when desire or lack of it is discussed, the older generation
generally faults the younger generation for lack of desire (especially lack of love for Tamil), and the younger
generation of course rolls its eyes and replies that the older folks ‘just
don’t get it.’
But perhaps the more serious problem here is the economic
issue. Tamil has no economic value in Singapore,
since almost no jobs exist for people who know Tamil, or know it better than
they know English.
To this the older generation, imbued with a love of Tamil that seems to be
difficult to instill transgenerationally, reply that younger Tamils should love
Tamil for reasons that are difficult to explain, or are just simply intangible. This situation calls to mind another
linguistic minority situation I have studied, that of German-Americans in 19th
century America
(Schiffman 1976).
German-American church denominations tried to maintain the
German language through the establishment of German-language schools for their
parishioners’ children, and requests from congregations to deal with the fact
that many younger members (known in German as die Nachkömmlinge) were becoming English speakers, were denied,
ignored, or stonewalled. The German-born
pastors and theologians simply could not fathom how their children and
grandchildren did not nurture the same love for the German language that they
had brought with them from Germany, and refused to allow the English language
any domains in these churches. This had
the unfortunate effect of driving die
Nachkömmlinge out of these churches and into membership in English-speaking
bodies, rather than making them love the German language. Perhaps the
requirement among Singapore Tamils that their children should love the Tamil
language as much as they do is having the same effect—driving them into the
embrace of English, which they already learn in school, especially for the study of ‘practical’ subjects. The parallels between this situation and the
German-American case are striking, since those schools also tried desperately
to maintain some domains for German, falling back on a formula that reserved
German for religious subjects (Bible study, hymn-singing, etc.) but English for
math, science, and geography.
Grin again has pointed out the necessity of a cooperative
approach:
There is no doubt that the behaviour
of actual or potential language users is crucial for the success of any policy
measure. Language use cannot be mandated, and there are many examples of
well-intentioned revitalisation policies that have failed to produce any
results, because of their top-down perspective, which ignored the role of
actors. This does not mean that the authorities must […] make language
decisions in their place. However, should we not expect the state to select
measures in such a way that they actually engage actual and potential users,
and result in effective minority language use? (Grin 2003:85)
One of the examples Grin cites here is that of Ireland,
where attempts at revitalization went on for decades after the establishment of
the Irish Republic,
but were mostly unsuccessful, and have now been largely abandoned. Irish citizens did not want to give up English,
and did not even feel tremendous enthusiasm about learning Irish for
sentimental reasons, even if they were forced by their school systems to do so.
As the European Union expands to take in new members, as it recently did, it
will be interesting to see whether this new state can help its citizens to
retain languages with so few speakers as Estonian, Slovenian, and Latvian, when
knowledge of English or some other language will obviously prove more ‘useful.’
Given the strong role of English in Singapore,
it is also questionable whether efforts to get citizens to maintain languages
spoken by less than 4% of the population will be successful in the long
run.
Conclusion. In the end, it seems clear that the
well-intentioned bilingual policy that Singapore
embarked upon some 25 years ago has had some successes, but its failures (or perhaps the incompleteness of its successes)
has been built on some assumptions that
can not be substantiated. For the Tamils
in particular, bilingualism has been problematical, and the economic incentives
that Bourdieu (1982) has shown in his work on France
to be the real reason why people acquire a particular language
has led to language shift, not language maintenance. The cultural capital
available to English-knowing elites has been too much of a temptation, and the
desire to maintain a language with lesser economic value has been lacking. As Tyler et al. have shown, social policies
work best that appear to have been arrived at in a fair and equitable manner,
but language policies are rarely arrived at anywhere in the world through any
consultation with their users. This is
particularly true in a top-down decision-making decision like that of
Singapore, so it is even less surprising that Singapore’s language policy is
not working well for some of its citizens.
What the Singapore
state (or more accurately, the Tamil section of the Ministry of Education and
the Tamil section of the Curriculum Development Board) could do to rectify this
before it is too late (if indeed it is not already too late), is not clear. But it is clear that a policy with so many
unchallenged assumptions, and one that does not include careful attention to the
question of whether they can in fact be implemented, can only be characterized
as one in which implementation is the main problem.
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