What is our Singaporean mother tongue?

“What is your mother tongue?” I am often stumped when foreigners ask me this seemingly straightforward question. Do I tell them that my mother tongue is Mandarin Chinese, because I am a Chinese Singaporean, and Mandarin Chinese is the mother tongue “designated” to me by the state?

If so, it is likely that I would end up launching into a mini tutorial on Singapore’s language policies. I would have to explain why Mandarin Chinese is my mother tongue even though I do not use it very often and it was not the language that I first encountered as a child. 

This personal example illustrates the broader trend that the definitions of mother tongue, to which Singaporeans are accustomed, are not based on any sound linguistic criteria.

What then would such linguistic criteria look like? While such a search is by no means straightforward or intuitive, I propose here four conditions that go some way to define the “mother tongue” in linguistic terms. 

The first definition comes from examining one’s language inheritance: The linguistic repertoire to which a child is exposed from birth. I stress the word ‘repertoire’, for in the case of a child born to multilingual parents that is common in Singapore, the child’s language inheritance does not pertain to a single language, but a whole set of languages that the parents use when communicating with the child. 

One’s mother tongue can also be defined by a second condition, namely, language expertise. This refers to one’s proficiency in a language.

Under this condition, one’s mother tongue is the language in which one is most proficient. Expertise can be assessed by proficiency in speaking, writing, and comprehension. 

The third condition for defining a mother tongue is language function — the set of important and personal domains in which a language is used most. This can refer to the language one chooses when communicating with members living in the same household, whether partners, siblings or housemates.

Language function can also point to its use in one’s leisurely entertainment, such as watching movies and TV shows, listening to the radio, or engaging in online games. Language function also extends to the language one chooses to communicate with one’s closest friends, significant other, and even ourselves. 

The fourth and final condition for defining mother tongue is language identification.

Language identification is the language used by a speaker for community identification; this community can be ethnic, cultural, or national. More importantly, language identification takes into account the language a speaker uses for self-identification; in other words, the language that a speaker believes is his or her own language. 

The language that fulfils the four conditions above would be one’s real mother tongue. To know what language fulfils the four conditions above, there are four simple questions you can ask yourself, each corresponding to each of the four conditions. These four questions are:

1. What is the first language(s) to which I was exposed from birth? 
2. What is the language(s) in which I am most proficient?
3. What is the language(s) I use the most?
4. What is the language(s) that I would say is mine?         

Your answer to these four questions will be your real mother tongue. I am quite confident that for most Singaporeans, their real linguistic mother tongue is not the mother tongue the state has assigned them.

I know this from extensive research data that I have written about elsewhere, which shows that in fact, English is the language that fulfils the four linguistic conditions for many Singaporeans, especially younger ones.

English has penetrated almost all aspects of life for the everyday Singaporean. What this means then is that we have to come to realise that English, a language that is not a state-assigned mother tongue, may actually be the real linguistic mother tongue for many Singaporeans.

This should come as no surprise, as Singapore’s censuses of population over the years have already exhibited an increasing and pervasive use of English. 

Indeed, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong recently noted that 71 per cent of Chinese households mainly use English at home, up from 42 per cent two decades ago. The increases were similarly sharp for Malay households (from 18 to 67 per cent) and Indian households (from 55 to 70 per cent).

Might it be possible then to think about having English as a mother tongue for Singaporeans? This would be much closer to our linguistic realities. Making English a mother tongue in policy terms, if one thinks about it simply, is a matter of giving English an additional status, on top of its other statuses, such as being an official and working language.

This move will not change the way of life in Singapore, and the bilingual education system that Singapore is so very proud of will remain as it is.

In fact, the bilingual education system will be a lot more flexible with English as a mother tongue, because there would no longer be a need for anyone to be tied to an ethnic mother tongue.

So an ethnically Chinese person could study both English and Malay; or a Malay Singaporean could study both English and Mandarin — if they so desire.

One can envisage many different alternatives to making language policies more viable in Singapore, and more reflective of our linguistic nuances.

It is not my aim here, however, to make any policy recommendation, or suggest that the Government needs to reevaluate its language policies to account for changing population profiles and the variety of linguistic experiences that the Singaporean population now has.

Instead, I hope to have provided a tool for Singaporeans to have a better linguistic understanding of their mother tongue. Perhaps, with this, Singaporeans now need not be constrained to think about their mother tongues according to what the state has decreed for them, and can finally have the autonomy to decide what their mother tongue is.

Hopefully, in future, the question “what is your mother tongue?” would no longer be as difficult  to answer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tan Ying Ying is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at Nanyang Technological University. She is the first Singaporean to have received the prestigious Fung Global Fellowship from Princeton University.  This first appeared in The Birthday Book (2019), a collection of 54 essays on “narratives, undiscovered and underway” in Singapore. TODAY will be publishing other essays from the book.