In Singapore, Chinese Dialects Revive

After Decades of Restrictions

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By IAN JOHNSONAUG. 26, 2017

Tok Kim Kiok, left, and his wife, Law Ngoh Kiaw, both Hokkien speakers, look on as their English-
speaking grandchildren play. CreditSim Chi Yin for The New York Times
SINGAPORE — The Tok and Teo families are a model of traditional harmony, with three
generations gathered under one roof, enjoying each other’s company over slices of fruit and
cups of tea on a Saturday afternoon in Singapore.
There is only one problem: The youngest and oldest generations can barely communicate with
each other. Lavell, 7, speaks fluent English and a smattering of Mandarin Chinese, while her
grandmother, Law Ngoh Kiaw, prefers the Hokkien dialect of her ancestors’ home in
southeastern China. That leaves grandmother and granddaughter looking together at a doll
house on the floor, unable to exchange more than a few words. “She can’t speak our Hokkien,”

Mrs. Law said with a sigh, “and doesn’t really want to speak Mandarin, either.”
This struggle to communicate within families is one of the painful effects of the Singapore
government’s large-scale, decades-long effort at linguistic
Starting with a series of measures in the late 1970s, the leaders of this city-state effectively
banned Chinese dialects, the mother tongues of about three-quarters of its citizens, in favor of
Mandarin, China’s official language. A few years later, even Mandarin usage was cut back in
favor of the global language of commerce, English.
“Singapore used to be like a linguistic tropical rain forest — overgrown, and a bit chaotic but
very vibrant and thriving,” said Tan Dan Feng, a language historian in Singapore. “Now, after
decades of pruning and cutting, it’s a garden focused on cash crops: learn English or Mandarin
to get ahead and the rest is useless, so we cut it down.”This linguistic repression, and the
consequences for multigenerational families, has led to a widespread sense of resentment —
and now a softening in the government’s policy.

For the first time since the late 1970s, a television series was recently broadcast in Hokkien,
which in the 1970s was the first language of about 40 percent of Singaporeans. Many young
people are also beginning to study dialects on their own, hoping to reconnect with their past, or
their grandparents. And in May, the government endorsed a new multidialectal, with the
minister of education making a personal appearance at the film’s release, unthinkable just a
few years ago.
The government’s easing of restrictions amid public discontent makes Singapore something of
case study for how people around the world are reacting against the rising cultural
homogeneity that comes with globalization.
“I began to realize that Hokkien was my real mother tongue and Mandarin was my stepmother
tongue,” said Lee Xuan Jin, 18, who started a Facebook page dedicated to preserving Hokkien.
“And I wanted to get to know my real mother.”For Singapore’s first generation of leaders, those
sorts of ideas sounded like sentimentalism. At the time of the founding of the Republic of
Singapore in 1965, it was led by a charismatic and authoritarian prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew,
who was a self-taught linguist. A product of the English-speaking elite who rarely spoke Chinese
dialects, including Mandarin, Mr. Lee held the popular idea, discredited by linguists, that
language was a zero-sum game: speaking more of one meant less mastery of another.
In short, he considered dialects a waste of the brain’s finite storage capacity when it should be
filled with, above all else, English.

“He felt that since he couldn’t do it, the rest couldn’t do it,” said Prof. Lee Cher Leng, a language
historian in the China studies department at the National University of Singapore, referring to
Mr. Lee’s inability to fluently speak multiple languages. “He felt it would be too confusing for
kids to learn the dialects. ”As the government considered which of Singapore’s many languages
to focus on, Mandarin Chinese and English were the logical choices. China, although more than
a thousand miles away, was the ancestral homeland of most Singaporeans and was embarking
on economic reforms that captivated Mr. Lee. English, the language of Singapore’s elite since
the British established a trading port here in 1819, was the dominant global language of culture
and commerce. But neither language had much to do with the people who lived in Singapore
when the government launched its policy in the 1970s.
Then, as now, roughly 7 percent of Singaporeans came from southern India and most spoke
Tamil. Another 15 percent spoke Malay. The ethnic Chinese, who then as now make up 75
percent of the population, had immigrated over the centuries from several mostly southern
Chinese provinces, especially Fujian (where Hokkien is spoken) and Guangdong (home to
Cantonese, Teochew, and Hakka). Only 2 percent spoke Mandarin.

Although called “dialects” by the government, some of these Chinese tongues are at least as
different as the various Romance languages. The government’s policy was something like
ordering Spaniards, French and Italians to abandon the languages they grew up with in favor of
Portuguese. The policy was rolled out in waves. In 1979, the government launched a “Speak
Mandarin” campaign. In some schools, pupils who spoke dialects were fined and made to write
out hundreds of times, “I will not speak dialects.” The population was bombarded with
messages that dialect speakers had no future.

The government clamped down on Chinese dialects like Hokkien for decades, but now many
young people are eager to learn them.
By 1981, television and radio were banned from broadcasting almost all dialect shows,
including popular music. That left many people cut off from society.
“Old people suddenly couldn’t understand anything on the radio,” said Lee Hui Min, a writer
whose best-known work, “Growing Up in the Era of Lee Kuan Yew,” recounts those decades.
“There was a sense of loss.”
Then, in 1987, to foster unity across Singapore’s three major ethnic groups, Chinese, Indian and
Malay, English became the main method of instruction in all schools. Today, almost all
instruction is in English except for a class in the student’s native tongue: Tamil and Malay for
ethnic Indians and Malays, and Mandarin for ethnic Chinese.
The dominance of English was captured in a recent government survey that showed English is
the most widely spoken language at home, followed by Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. Only 12
percent of Singaporeans speak a Chinese dialect at home, according to the survey, compared
with an estimated 50 percent a generation ago.
“Sometimes people say the Singaporeans aren’t too expressive,” said Kuo Jian Hong, the artistic
director of The Theater Practice, an influential theater founded by her father, the pioneering
playwright and arts activist Kuo Pao Kun. “I feel this is partly because so many of us lost our
mother tongue.”

But as Singapore has prospered, many are searching for their cultural roots, a trend that has
picked up since the passing of former Prime Minister Lee in 2015. Some are trying to protect
historical monuments, others challenging official versions of history, or passionately defending
“Singlish,” a local patois of English, Chinese dialects and Malay.
For some, it means committing to learn their ancestral language.
At the Hokkien Huay Kuan, a community center founded in 1840 to promote education and
social welfare among immigrants from Fujian Province, classes have been offered for the past
few years in the Hokkien dialect.
One recent Friday evening, about 20 people sat in a small classroom learning phrases like
“reunion meal,” “praying for blessings” and “dragon dance.” Three students were doctors
specializing in geriatric care who wanted to understand older patients. Others were simply
curious.

“I think it’s to understand our roots,” said Ivan Cheung, 34, who works in Singapore’s oil
refining industry. “To know our roots you have to know dialect.”
The head of the community center, Perng Peck Seng, said that it, too, had seen the effects of
the government policy. When he joined in the 1980s, all meetings were held in Hokkien and
Mandarin. Now they are held in English and Mandarin because too few people, even in his
organization, speak Hokkien fluently enough to conduct meetings.
But Mr. Perng stopped short of criticizing the government. Instead, he said Singaporeans
themselves had to take responsibility for the loss of their language diversity.
“Sometimes I think we are too docile,” Mr. Perng said. “Leaders said if you speak too much
dialect it’ll affect your success in life, so many people dropped it on their own accord. The
biggest problem is our own consciousness.”
 CURRENT ISSUES IN LEARNING TO
READ CHINESE
Ovid 1. L. Tzeng
National Yang Ming University

Abstract : This paper starts with a historical overview of Chinese orthography, including how its
characteristics as one of the world's most phonologically 'deep' orthographies affect phonological and
semantic processing in beginning readers. The question of how these concepts are relevant to issues
such as dyslexia and cerebral lateralization in Chinese is addressed, especially in comparison with
languages that are quite different in their phonology-orthography correspondences. Special application
of the concepts 'regularity' and 'consistency' in Chinese are offered, including how these concepts
provide evidence of grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) in Chinese reading. The role of
orthographic 'friends ' and 'enemies' within the 'neighborhood' of a Chinese graphic element is
described, and it is suggested that when learning characters, children acquire systematic orthographic
knowledge that serves to underlie the mapping between print and sound. Finally, it is argued that a
comprehensive Chinese orthography processing theory need not focus on whether phonological
activation does or does not occur at a given moment in processing time, but rather that the field would
be better served by a model that explicates the nature of lexical component interaction under varied
processing conditions.

Keywords: Chinese reading, 'deep' and 'shallow' orthographies, fMRI, grapheme-phoneme

correspondence, orthographic consistency, orthographic friends and enemies, orthographic
neighborhood, orthographic regularity

INTRODUCTION
Orthographies may be defined as either "shallow" or "deep", depending on the ease of predicting the
pronunciation of a word from the surface structure of its written form. In shallow orthographies, the
spelling sound correspondence is direct: given the rules, any fluent reader can name the word
immediately and without exception. In contrast, in the case of deep orthographies, the deeper the
orthography , the more arbitrary is the spelling correspondence. One might expect that depending on
how different spoken languages are represented by their corresponding printed symbols, readers must
develop different processing strategies for the different languages to achieve proficiency in reading.
Failure to develop these strategies for that script may result in a certain type of dyslexia that might have
been avoided if another kind of script had been learned instead. For example, due to the relatively close
grapheme-phoneme correspondence, beginning readers of English rely upon information from the
phonemic structure of the language in order to learn to read. If children are unable to develop the
appropriate "linguistic awareness" of such phonetic structure, although they might be termed 'dyslexic'
in English, they might nevertheless encounter no problem in learning to read scripts with deeper
orthographies, like Chinese or Japanese. This idea was reinforced by the success of Rozin, Poritsky, and
Sotsky (1971) taught a group of Philadelphia 2nd-grade children with reading problems to read English
written with Chinese characters. Given that the difficulties in dyslexia are thought to lie in the mapping
between graphemes and phonemes and in the blending of the phonetic elements of words (Rozin,
Poritsky, & Sotsky , 1971), since Chinese orthography was thought to map directly onto speech at the
level of words and syllables rather than of phonemes, these children were thought to be able to read
characters directly because it was not necessary for them to go through the phoneme mapping and
blending processes

During the same period, Makita (1968) reported that dyslexia is ostensibly uncommon in Japan and
suggested that this is attributable to the Japanese use of ideographic scripts (kanji)(Makita, 1968). A
series of reports by Sasanuma (Sasanuma, 1974; Sasanuma & Fujimura, 1971, 1972) presented the
selective impairment of reading kanji (Chinese logographs) and kana (phonetic symbols for syllables)
scripts in Japanese aphasic speakers. This implied that there were differences underlying processes and
localization in reading alphabetic scripts like English and Japanese kana, and non-alphabetic scripts like
kanji. Under the influence of Sasanuma's work, investigators began to study visuallateralization effects
with kanji and kana and found right visual field superiority for recognizing kana (Hatta, 1976), indicating
a left hemisphere superiority for processing kana script, while other studies report left visual field
superiority for kanji (Hatta, 1977; Sasanuma, Itoh, Mori, & Kobayashi, 1977), suggesting that kanji are
processed in the right hemisphere. Thus, it seemed that sound-based scripts such as English and
Japanese kana are processed in the left hemisphere, whereas phonologically 'deep' logographic symbols
like Chinese and Japanese kanji are processed in the right hemisphere due to different processing
requirements. Henceforward, the view that Chinese orthography is an ideographic writing system that
does not convey any phonological information was further upheld.
The Disappearing Dialect at the Heart of China’s
Capital
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Sinosphere
By: EMILY FENG NOV. 23, 2016

“You almost never hear the old Beijing dialect on the city streets nowadays,” said Gao Guosen,
68. Mr. Gao has been identified as one of a diminishing number of “pure” speakers of the
dialect.
BEIJING — To the untutored ear, the Beijing dialect can sound like someone talking with a
mouthful of marbles, inspiring numerous parodiesand viral videos. Its colorful vocabulary and
distinctive pronunciation have inspired traditional performance arts such as cross-talk, a form
of comic dialogue, and “kuaibanr,’’ storytelling accompanied by bamboo clappers.
But the Beijing dialect is disappearing, a victim of language standardization in schools and
offices, urban redevelopment, and migration. In 2013, officials and academics in the Chinese
capital began a project to record the dialect’s remaining speakers before it fades away
completely. The material is to be released to the public as an online museum and interactive
database by year’s end.

“You almost never hear the old Beijing dialect on the city streets nowadays,” said Gao Guosen,
68, who has been identified by the city government as a “pure” speaker. “I don’t even speak it
anymore with my family members or childhood friends.” The dialect’s most marked
characteristic is its habit of adding an “r” to the end of syllables. This, coupled with the frequent
“swallowing” of consonants, can give the Beijing vernacular a punchy, jocular feel. For example,
“buzhidao,’’ standard Chinese for ‘‘I don’t know,’’ becomes “burdao’’ in the Beijing dialect.
“Laoshi,’’ or “teacher,” can come out sounding “laoer.”

In the 1930s, China’s Republican government began defining and promoting a common
language for the country, referred to in English as Mandarin, that drew heavily, but far from
completely, on the Beijing dialect. The Communist government’s introduction of an
official Romanization system in the 1950s reinforced standardized pronunciation for Chinese
characters. These measures enhanced communication among Chinese from different regions,
but also diminished the relevance of dialects.A 2010 study by Beijing Union University found
that 49 percent of local Beijing residents born after 1980 would rather speak Mandarin than the
Beijing dialect, while 85 percent of migrants to Beijing preferred that their children learn
Mandarin.

The remaking of the city has also played a role in diluting the language. Into the mid-20th
century, much of Beijing’s population lived clustered in the hutongs, or alleyways, that
crisscrossed the neighborhoods surrounding the Forbidden City. Today, only a small fraction of
an estimated 3,700 hutongs remain, their residents often scattered to apartment complexes on
the city’s outskirts.

The city has also become a magnet for migrants from other parts of China. According to
China’s last national census, an average of about 450,000 people moved to Beijing each year
between 2000 and 2010, making about one-third of Beijing’s residents nonlocals.
Mr. Gao, a diminutive man with a booming voice, remembers how different it used to be.
“Until this project, I didn’t even know that what I was speaking was a dialect, because everyone
around me used to speak like that,” Mr. Gao said in his new apartment, not far from the hutong
where he lived for more than 60 years.
According to the United Nations, nearly 100 Chinese dialects, many of them spoken by China’s
55 recognized ethnic minorities, are in danger of dying out. Efforts are also underway
in Shanghai, as well as in Jiangsu and five other provinces, to create databases as part of a
project under the Ministry of Education to research dialects and cultural practices nationwide.
Yet the potential loss of the Beijing dialect is especially alarming because of the cultural heft it
carries.

“As China’s ancient and modern capital, Beijing and thus its linguistic culture as well are
representative of our entire nation’s civilization,” said Zhang Shifang, a professor at the Beijing
Language and Culture University who oversaw the effort to record native speakers. “For Beijing
people themselves, the Beijing dialect is an important symbol of identity.”
The dialect is a testament to the city’s tumultuous history of invasion and foreign rule. The
Mongol Empire ruled China in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Manchus, an ethnic group from
northeast Asia, ruled from the mid-17th century into the 20th. As a result, the Beijing dialect
contains words derived from both Mongolian and Manchurian. The intervening Ming dynasty,
which maintained its first capital in Nanjing for several decades before moving to Beijing,
introduced southern speech elements.The dialect varied within the city itself. The historically
wealthier neighborhoods north of the Forbidden City spoke with an accent considered more
refined than that found in the poorer neighborhoods to the south, home to craftsmen and
performers.

In Shanghai, some schools teach in Shanghainese rather than Mandarin. The Beijing city
government has explored the idea of developing teaching materials in the Beijing dialect.
However, these proposals have been criticized by those who fear such lessons would diminish
the effectiveness of Mandarin-language education.
“As a Beijing native, I personally hope the dialect will survive,’’ said Wang Hong, a third-grade
teacher at the Affiliated Elementary School of Peking University. “But if you aren’t a native,
there’s no reason to learn Mandarin plus a dialect. You would just confuse the two.”
The researchers documenting the Beijing dialect are quick to stress the preservationist nature of
their efforts.

“We aren’t promoting the teaching of dialects in school, because China is still a Mandarin-
speaking society,” said He Hongzhi, the director of the forthcoming online dialect museum,
which will showcase some of the recordings collected by Professor Zhang.
For Mr. Gao, the vanishing dialect of his youth is nothing to be mourned, though he is happy
that more people are paying attentio

Difficulty in Chinese Language

Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn for people whose native language is
English, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean. According to the Foreign Service Institute, a
native English speaker needs over 2,200 hours of intensive study, taking 88 weeks (one year and
about 8 months), to learn Mandarin. A quote attributed to William Milne, Morrison's colleague, goes
that learning Chinese isa work for men with bodies of brass, lungs of steel, heads of oak, hands of
springsteel, hearts of apostles, memories of angels, and lives of Methuselah.

Characters
While English uses an alphabet, Chinese uses hanzi, or Chinese characters, as its writing system
The Kangxi dictionary contains 47,035 characters (simplified Chinese: 汉字; traditional Chinese: 漢
字; pinyin: Hànzì). However, most of the characters contained there are archaic and obscure.
The Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代汉语常用字表
; traditional Chinese: 現代漢語常用字表; pinyin: Xiàndài Hànyǚ Chángyòng Zì Biǎo), promulgated
in People's Republic of China, lists 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less-than-common
characters, while the Chart of Generally Utilized Characters of Modern Chinese (simplified
Chinese: 现代汉语通用字表; traditional Chinese: 現代漢語通用字表; pinyin: Xiàndài Hànyǚ
Tōngyòng Zì Biǎo) lists 7,000 characters, including the 3,500 characters already listed above.
In his 1991 article "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard," David Moser states that an English speaker
would find the "ridiculous" writing system "unreasonably hard to learn" to the level of achieving
literacy due to the large number of characters. Moser argued that he was unable to "comfortably
read" a newspaper even though he knew 2,000 characters. The 17th-century Protestant
theologian Elias Grebniz, said that Chinese characters were:
through God's fate introduced by the devil / so he may keep those miserable people ever more
entangled in the darkness of idolatry.
In Gautier's novella Fortunio, a Chinese professor from the Collège de France, when asked by the
protagonist to translate a love letter suspected to be written in Chinese, replied that the characters in
the letter happen to all belong to that half of the 40,000 characters which he has yet to master.

Tones
Mandarin Chinese has four tones (simplified Chinese: 声调; traditional Chinese: 聲調
; pinyin: shēngdiào), namely the first tone (flat or high level tone, 阴平, denoted by " ¯ " in Pinyin), the
second tone (rising or high-rising tone, 阳平, denoted by " ˊ " in Pinyin), the third tone (falling-rising or
low tone, 上声, denoted by " ˇ " in Pinyin), and the fourth tone (falling or high-falling tone, 去声,
denoted by " ˋ " in Pinyin). There is also a fifth tone called neutral (轻声，denoted as no-mark in
Pinyin) although the official name of the tones is Four Tones.

Many other Chinese dialects have more, for example, Cantonese has six (often numbered as nine,
but three are duplicates). In most Western languages, tones are only used to express emphasis or
emotion, not to distinguish meanings as in Chinese. A French Jesuit, in a letter, relates how the
Chinese tones cause a problem for understanding:
I will give you an example of their words. They told me chou [shu in modern Pinyin signifies a book:
so that I thought whenever the word chou was pronounced, a book was the subject. Not at all! Chou,
the next time I heard it, I found signified a tree. Now I was to recollect, chou was a book, or a tree.
But this amounted to nothing; chou, I found, expressed also great heats; chou is trelate; chou is the
Aurora; chou means to be accustomed; chou expresses the loss of a wager, &c. I should not finish,
were I to attempt to give you all its significations.
Moser also stated that tones were a contributing factor to the difficulty of learning Chinese, partly
because it is difficult for non-native learners to know how to convey emotion using intonation whilst
retaining the correct tones.
 CURRENT ISSUES
ABOUT CHINESE
LANGUAGE GLOBALLY

Group XI
Astillero,Kevin Donn
Yee,Patricia Dominique
Uy, Eunizelle
Vingno, Shaina Mae
Ramos, Lenaryle D.
Humanities 002 November 12,2017