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Punjabis in Singapore make up about 0.4% of the total population, that is 15000 in numbers. Despite being such a small community, they have managed to make strong contributions both within their own community and to Singapore.
In Singapore, language planning is done at the very top levels of government, is very sociopolitical in nature and done for the good of society as a whole. Yet, such a small community has managed to convince the government, by making representations and presentations, to offer its mother tongue as second language, albeit that the teaching, management and funding of these classes must be done solely on the expenses and efforts of the community. There are many obvious reasons why Punjabi would not be considered useful for Punjabis in Singapore and yet many efforts have been made by the community to preserve the language and teach it to the young. Looking at the history of Sikh Punjabis may perhaps give an idea as to why keeping the language is so important to Singaporean Punjabis to this day.
One historical factor that explains why Sikh Punjabis place such an importance on the Punjabi language is that for the Sikhs, religion is closely tied with language. The first Sikh Guru (Prophet), introduced a clipped or imperfect alphabet of Punjabi, but the second Guru, Guru Angad, modified and polished the existing script. Since it was the Gurus that created this alphabet and adopted it, the alphabet was called Gurmukhi spoken through the mouth of the Guru. The significance of the adoption of this script by Guru Angad lies in the fact that he rejected all other scripts (previously the Persian script was used as well as the Landa script), and adopted the script which was his own and which was suited to the language of the people. It also helped to enhance their culture. He also broke the Brahmin's monopoly of learning by encouraging all people to learn Gurmukhi (the Guru's script) and read religious literature. From then onwards everything was recorded in the Gurmukhi script.
Hence till today, the language is seen not only as a tool for communication amongst Punjabis, but is also their religious language and something that is their own. Knowing the language allows one access to religious texts, hymns and literature and is a link to a history that the Sikhs are very proud of and continue to instill in their children. Other Indian minorities are either Hindu, Christian or Muslim, which means that their original religious texts are not in their mother tongue, but in Sanskrit, English and Arabic respectively and therefore, this type of link is not present.
In history, Sikhs were also a much persecuted group because of their religious beliefs. The Tenth Guru, and the last prophet, instituted the Khalsa brotherhood (the brotherhood of the pure) on 13th April 1699. From then a physical struggle commenced against the combined Imperial and Hindu Raja forces, in which the Tenth Guru was killed, just before he installed the Guru Granth Sahib (the holy book) as the Spiritual Guru for eternity. Many Sikhs died defending their religion, not only in this struggle, but other great massacres in 1716, 1746, 1762. In 1957, 1762 and 1762 the Afghan and Moghul forces spent their fury upon Amritsar (the holy city of the Sikh) blowing up the Golden Temple (an important symbol of Sikhism) and the holy water surrounding the temple being defiled with carcasses of animals. The Holocaust and defilement only strengthened the Sikh determination for resistance, the ultimate result being the establishment of the Sikh rule in Punjab in 1799. The bitter struggles Sikhs had to put up with in the defence of their religion makes Punjabi an even more important symbol of their solidarity, loyalty and strength (given its tight association with religion) even up till today.
Other historical developments also provide reasons for the strong affiliations Sikhs have with their language. For instance in 1849, treachery eventually destroyed the short period of good administration with the British getting the upper hand. From then commenced the dispersal of Sikhs too other parts of India and neighbouring countries. Sikhs that tried to migrate to Canada and Australia were obstructed by the British and this led to bloody killings. The migrations of the Sikh from their homeland was not totally voluntary but because of the oppressions they faced. Hence the ties with their homeland were still strong and the Punjabi language was still a central part of their lives and passed down to their children. The same was true for all the refugee Sikhs that migrated to other parts of the world during the India partition.
Sikhs came to Singapore throughout the 19th century and 20th century. They held a variety of jobs in Singapore. However they featured mainly in the police force, as watchmen as well as in the military during the Second World War. The Sikhs have always been a hard working group of people and hence when they came to Singapore, they saw Singapore as a land of opportunities (after the troubles they had faced in their own homelands). While many of them worked in unprofessional jobs, however they pushed their children to study hard and as a result producing a breed of well educated Sikhs who would go on to hold jobs in various professional fields like law, politics, journalism and medicine as well as in business and in the armed forces. The second generation Sikhs whose parents had come from Punjab had been taught that English was very important for them to succeed (after the second world war) as English was then used in Singapore as a working language and as a language of communication between different races. However, because of strong religious and cultural ties to Punjab, as well as the fact that their parents spoke mostly Punjabi, these second generation Sikhs showed language loyalty towards the Punjabi language.
However in recent years, many Punjabi children no longer show such affinity to the language. There are several reasons for this. First of all,most of their parents, who have been educated in the Singapore Education System, speak English and communicate with their children in this language. Parents feel that speaking the language excellently will be an asset to their children and hence, consciously or unconsciously let Punjabi take the backseat. The only time when these children speak Punjabi is with their grandparents. Also, unlike before, ethnic groups do not live in enclaves anymore. According to government policy, each HDB flat must roughly have proportions of Chinese, Malay and Indian residents coinciding with national figure proportions. Over time, Punjabis moved out of their enclaves and settled in different parts of Singapore. As a result Punjabi children don't mix often with other Punjabis (especially considering the fact that there are about only 15000 Punjabis in Singapore) and even when they do meet friends of the same race, they converse in English. In school they took Malay as a second language as it was seen as an "easier" subject to study.
When the Punjabi community began to see signs that the younger generation were showing a lack of interest in the language and the culture, the community took steps to correct this change quickly. As mentioned earlier, Punjabi classes were held in temples (Katong, Sembawang) and associations like "Khalsa" as far back as in the 1970s despite the fact that they were not extremely well planned and did not simply serve overt purposes but also latent purposes such as social purposes(place of meeting for the community), religious and moral functions.
In 1989, the Minister of Education at that time, Dr. Tony Tan, announced the decision to allow non Tamil Indian minority students to take their own mother tongue as part of Singapore's "Bilingual Policy", provided they managed and funded these classes on their own. The minority Indian languages that were offered were Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Gujerati and Bengali.
This decision was actually the result of a lot of hard work from the minority Indian communities which felt that teaching the Indian minority students their own mother tngue would help them understand and appreciae their own culture, values and religions. Before this official decision was announced, the different Indian minority groups made representations and presentations to MPs and other bodies for their own mother tongues to be taught to the India minority students.
Hence by tracing history until this day, one is able to see why the Punjabi language is still such a central part of a Punjabi's life despite its lack of relevance here today. 
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