Part II.pdf - MTB-MLE Network

Singapore
More than 20 languages are spoken in Singapore, a nation aiming at societal multilingualism and
bilingualism among its population. Three quarters of the population are ethnic Chinese speaking
many different varieties of Chinese. English is the sole medium of instruction at all levels of
education, and three other official languages, i.e. Malay, Mandarin Chinese and Tamil, are taught
as second languages called mother tongues (Grimes 2000; Jernudd 1999; Kaplan & Baldauf 2003;
Leclerc 2004j; B. Lin pers. comm. 2004; Pakir 2004).
Students speaking Indian languages other than Tamil can also study those languages as subjects.
Speakers of other languages can freely choose from those offered in the school curriculum, but
there is no provision for education in local languages as such, unlike in most nations in South-East
Asia. Most Singaporean Chinese have not traditionally spoken Mandarin as their first language,
and this is a reason why only about a third of the population is estimated to receive education in
their mother tongue. The situation is rapidly changing, however, as younger generations are becoming
bilingual in English and Mandarin. Thus, these languages are becoming the mother tongues of
such students because they are increasingly being used at home (ibid.)
China
Officially, China is a country of 56 nationalities but, in fact, more than 200 languages are spoken
in the country. Thus, many nationalities consist of several quite diverse language groups that are
sometimes as different as English and German, for example. (Bradley, Bradley & Li 1999; Stites
1999). The Han majority comprises more than 90 percent of the total population, and speaks many
mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua) is the official language.
Ethnic minorities, though only eight percent of the Chinese population, still number close to
a 100 million people (Grimes 2000, Huang 2003; Leclerc 2004d; Lin 1997; Liu 2000; Zhou 2000).
The Chinese Constitution provides all nationalities of China the freedom to use and develop their
languages. A law relating to ethnic minorities adds that conditions permitting, ethnic minority
languages should be the media of instruction in schools where the majority of students belong to
minority groups. However, in many places these laws are not implemented, and there are no
regulations to guarantee that implementation actually takes place (Blachford 1997, 163; Jernudd,
1999, 119; Leclerc 2004d).
Nonetheless, government support to mother-tongue education applies only to the 55 designated
national minorities, leaving some 150 language communities without validation of their need for
language development and mother-tongue education. In addition, in Han areas, especially the less
developed rural areas where varieties of Chinese other than Mandarin are spoken, many students
have difficulty understanding teaching unless teachers use a dialect of Chinese spoken in the region
(Postiglione 1999). Many official minority languages already have writing systems, yet more than
20 still lack them (Blachford 1997, 157; Huang 2003; Stites 1999, 99-101). However, a major
problem in language development is that many more than 55 writing systems are needed in China
to provide mother-tongue education to all speakers of minority languages.
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