From Coby Lubliner:<\/p>\n
I have lately been watching an Australian TV series, \"Serangoon Road,\" taking place in Singapore in the 1960s. The dialogue is mostly in English, but when it isn't it's in Mandarin, both among the Chinese and between them and the main character, an Australian who speaks it. I have so far heard no trace of any other Chinese. Is that realistic?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My reply to Coby:<\/p>\n
Of course, it's not realistic, because on the streets and in the homes of Singapore you would also hear Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, etc., in fact, more so than Mandarin, I think.\u00a0 And there would have been even less Mandarin in Singapore during the 60s than now, with the push to teach Mandarin in schools and the recent immigration of large numbers of people from the Mainland, though my own experience is that not even the latter are necessarily fluent speakers of Putonghua.\u00a0 If the Chinese were interacting with the Mandarin speaking Australian, they would naturally try to communicate with him in Mandarin, to the extent they were able to do so.\u00a0 The fact that this is an Australian TV series would constrain the availability of speakers of non-Mandarin topolects.\u00a0 And the producers might not even be aware of the need to represent the other topolects.<\/p>\n
Through a friend, I asked LEE Kok Leong for his opinion about the Sinitic mix in Singapore.\u00a0 Just to introduce KL Lee, his blog is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lee studies Singapore society and published an interesting book on Cantonese majie<\/i><\/a> (female domestic housekeepers),\u300aGu\u01cengd\u014dng m\u0101ji\u011b \u5e7f\u4e1c\u5988\u59d0\u300b, a year ago.\u00a0 Here's his take on the various Chinese languages in Singapore vis-\u00e0-vis English.<\/p>\n As \u00a0I did not watch the said Australian TV series, I am not in the position to comment. But for languages used among Chinese, it is rather complex. Using English to talk to each other in the good old days was not uncommon among the higher social class<\/b>. For example, Lee kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, could only command English and Malay. He only learned Mandarin and Hokkien (one of the popular local dialects among the Chinese) in the much later years for general election purpose. English was his most powerful language because of his baba<\/a> family background. When Lee and his colleagues founded PAP in 1954, the party had two camps: English speaking and Chinese speaking. Lee belonged to the English speaking group. For his successor Goh Chok Tong, Goh only learned Chinese and spoke broken Mandarin in 1990s.<\/span><\/p>\n For the general public<\/strong>, their ancestors came from the southern part of China and spoke 5 main dialects: Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese. The first three are the most common. Although Chinese schools taught in Mandarin, but dialects were still common among the Chinese. Dialects were their mother tongue.<\/p>\n This trend was changing in the 1970s and completely changed in the 1980s when Singapore became more industrialised, Chinese schools completely closed and government purposely curbed dialects. Since then, English is the working language up to today. In today's Singapore, Chinese families who communicate in English are more than those in Chinese. If you see another Chinese stranger, more often than not you would start the communication in English. China immigrants are adapting fast.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n From Jane (Geok Hoon) Williams, a long-term reader of Language Log:<\/p>\n My parents' generation is called, endearingly, Pioneer Generation – the PAP<\/a> government seems to pump lots of money to them (the elderly here are very happy I think as my mum can't praise the government enough). I remember in the 80s, \u65b9\u8a00* was strictly prohibited – the consequences of the social policy were that fangyan speakers were looked down upon (remembering Taiwan when Taiyu** was 'banned'?). Fangyan programmes were suspended. The mass media propaganda pushed Mandarin (to unite the nation) by suppression of fangyan….\u00a0 My mother – a Hokkien speaker, is a lost generation.<\/p>\n *VHM:\u00a0 f\u0101ngy\u00e1n (\"topolects\")<\/p>\n **VHM:\u00a0 T\u00e1iy\u01d4 \u53f0\u8a9e (\"Taiwanese\")<\/p>\n To return to the topic of the Australian TV series with which we began, here are two pages of reviews of \"Serangoon Road\"<\/a> — most of them are not very complimentary.<\/p>\n