Bilingualism Policy

This page will overview the bilingual policy of Singapore and the Ministry of Singapore.

According to Kuo and Chens (1983: 100) report, Singapore is known to be a planned society, and its planning framework is in general, a centralized one.

It is this very centralized policy that has made other indigenous languages outcast from the national identity since the government only chose to recognise the three major mother tongue languages for its language planning.

When I speak of bilingualism, I do not mean just the facility of two languages. It is more basic than that..

With the language(mother tongue) go the fables and proverbs. It is the learning of a new whole system, a whole life philosophy, that can maintain the fabric of our society intact, in spite of exposure to all the current madness around the world.

It is this very system that the Punjabi speakers felt deprived of when they were not allowed to study their language in the national curriculum. In fact, when they had to resort to taking other languages as substitutes, they are asked to compromise on their identity and cultural domain. That is contradictory of the nation's belief in retaining the Asianness in its people, of course the Asianness was to be of their own roots.

However, if the Punjabi students were to learn mother tongue languages other that their own, that would not instill their own cultural beliefs and traditions that can be emitted from their own indegenous languages.

Education Minister Tony Tan told Parliament last October that non-Tamil Indian students would be allowed to take one of the five minority Indian languages as their L2 this year.

In the past, non-Tamil Indian students had to choose one of the three official languages-Chinese, Malay or Tamil as L2 because of the difficulty in providing instruction in the minority languages and examining standards in examinations.

A Ministry of Education spokesman said yesterday that students are allowed to take one of the five minority languages as L2 because examinations in the subject are now available at O level and the standards are maintained by the Cambridge examination syndicate.

The question of allowing non-Tamil students to study their own mother tongue was raised as far back as 1956.

Mr. Bajan Singh, the chairman of the Sikh Advisory Board, says 400 students (in 1990) are currently studying at centers located in Balestier and Katong, though not as L2.

What is notable from this clip is the information that non-Tamil Indian students had to choose one of the three official languages-Chinese, Malay or Tamil as L2 because of the difficulty in providing instruction in the minority languages and examining standards in examinations.

Thus, the reason given for the exclusion of the Indian minority languages was the difficulty in providing instruction in the minority languages and examining standards in examinations.

However, both these problems have been solved by the Sikh Education Foundation and with some help from the MOE and the government, examinations have been vigilanted by the local Cambridge syndicate.