Introduction
The language ecology of Singapore has been shaped by educational policy, which in turn has been a response to a particularly complex language ecology. Concepts of indigeneity are meaningless in this city state, which has been a multicultural trading port since at least the fourteenth century (Gupta, 1994; Miksic, 2004), and whose present language make‐up is the result of British colonialism and associated immigration in the nineteenth century (Gupta, 1994; Platt and Weber, 1980). The colonial government manipulated the delivery of education as a tool of ethnic management and social engineering, and this policy has been continued by the government of independent Singapore (Benjamin, 1976; Bloom, 1986; Chua, 1995; Gopinathan, Pakir, Ho and Saravanan (eds), 1998; Gupta, 1994; Murray, 1971; Pennycook, 1994; PuruShotam, 1998; Tan, Gopinathan and Ho (eds), 1997; Tremewan, 1994).
The extreme societal and individual multilingualism of the early twentieth century (Kuo, 1976;...
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Notes
- 1.
The terms used for ethnic groups, languages and dialects are always problematic. I have used the terms currently used in official Singapore documents and glossed them by alternatives. The variety called ‘Mandarin Chinese’ can also be called ‘Modern Standard Chinese’ and is also known as guoyu (‘national language’), though this implies a political evaluation that would be regarded as inappropriate in modern Singapore. I use ‘Malay’ in its widest sense, to refer to all dialects, including the standard varieties of Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Indonesia. Singapore designates English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil as its official languages. Malay is the ‘national language’, which is a ceremonial designation.
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Gupta, A.F. (2008). The Language Ecology of Singapore. In: Hornberger, N.H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_224
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