Singapore Settee

Dialects - BRING IT BACK

WE should bring back Chinese dialects before it is totally forgotten.

My children were born and attended schools in Singapore. Both were bilingual (I use English with them and my wife use Mandarin with them). Unfortunately, that was the extent of their linguistic capability.

It was not until I had the opportunity to return to Malaysia for a considerable time that I had the change to consider how the children could actually benefited from learning more languages. In the time my family was in Malaysia, the children picked up Cantonese from their grandparents and Fujian from their schoolmates. On top of that, they were able to learn and use Malay in schools.

I had also intended to get the children to begin using Hakka (their mother's mother tongue). Both were able to understand basic greetings and some common Hakka words after they were taught. But we had to return to Singapore and we lost the chance for them to pick up the Hakka dialect effectively.

Now that we are back in Singapore, there has been many instances where they were able to hold conversations with various people including some tourists. They can understand their Malay schoolmates and they have more Malay friends because they can communicate easily with them.

These are some of the benefits of encouraging the young to speak more than English and understand rudimentary Mandarin - what has been going on in Singapore for the past many years. Unfortunately, it may already be too late to bring back dialects as even the older folks had learnt Mandarin to communicate with their grandchildren.

But we can get the Chinese clan groups to begin dialect classes to ensure that these tongues are not lost forever in Singapore. The clans themselves are facing numerous problems trying to recruit members in order to keep themselves alive. Perhaps, the dialect classes can be one way to bring back some life into them.

But there can also be disbenefits. The recent issues concerning the newcomers from India shows some issues must be thought through as well. Many may not realize that India has many dialects - probably more than the Chinese -and many of the language scripts are also different. Tamils are but from one province in India. Punjabbi are another. So is Malayalam. And they do not share the same written script.

Luckily all Chinese shares the same written script (let us not debate on the traditional or simplified scripts). And from the same script, we can speak in dialects. Is this not wonderful? It is time to bring back our dialects. LETS DO IT.

posted by JHG J Chang @ 4:42 pm