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6. Whose English? Language ownership in Singapore’s English language debates
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
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6 Whose English? Language ownership in Singapore’s English language debates Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng, Rani Rubdy, Sandra Lee McKay and Lubna Alsagoff ‘Language ideological debates’ (Blommaert 1999) are a common feature of Singapore politicking, and are centrally implicated in much of the social, economic, and political constructedness of the nation. As articulated by Blommaert (1999: 1–2), language debates ‘are organized around issues of purity and impurity of languages, the social “value” of some language(s) as opposed to (an)other(s), the socio-political desirability of the use of one language or language variety over another, the symbolic “quality” of languages and varieties as emblems’ of socio-cultural notions of nationhood, cultural authenticity, progress, modernity, and so forth. At the core of such debates are struggles ‘over definitions of social realities’, or the ‘politics of representation’ (Blommaert 1999: 9). With respect to the ‘politics of representation’ within the context of Singapore’s English language ideological debates, the notion of ownership becomes relevant — how speakers of different varieties of English are positioned and represented. Such institutional positioning involves value judgements (often negative) about languages and speakers of languages, often through the idealization of the native speaker found within the native speaker(NS)/non-native speaker (NNS) dichotomy, as well as an unwillingness to recognize the different varieties of world Englishes as legitimate languages. What is interesting in the Singapore context is how government leaders have appropriated much of this NS/NNS discourse in their own English language ideological debates. In broad strokes, English has been ideologically constructed as a purely instrumental and functional language within the context of nation building and the global economy. In this context, the officially preferred model is British RP, and the Inner Circle speakers of English continue to be regarded as the true owners of English. At the same time, speakers of the local variety of English, especially the colloquial form Singlish, are portrayed as uneducated, uncouth, and unworldly (Bokhorst-Heng 2005; Alsagoff 2007). One of the consequences of this ideological construction is that there is no discursive 134 Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng, Rani Rubdy, Sandra Lee McKay and Lubna Alsagoff space in Singapore’s language ideological formation to label English as a mother tongue or to allow Singaporeans the acquisition of native speaker membership — even though more and more Singaporeans do in fact primarily use English (Wee 2002) and English is the medium of instruction in all schools. According to the 2000 Census (Statistics 2000), 71% of the population is literate in English, and 23% report using predominantly English at home. Lim and Foley (2004: 6) maintain that there is a ‘growing body of English users for whom English has gone beyond the lingua franca stage, who are native speakers of the language, following the simple definition that a native speaker is a fluent speaker of the language, typically after having learnt the language as a child’. While the Singapore census does not ask questions about bilingual language practices, data from an ongoing Sociolinguistic Survey of Singapore (see Vaish et al. in this volume) involving 10-year-old Singaporeans indicate that 14.2% report using predominantly English at home — and 53% report bilingual practices, saying they use both English and their (ethnic) ‘mother-tongue’ (the official language associated with one’s father’s ethnicity) habitually at home. According to a survey administered by the English Language Curriculum and Pedagogy Review Committee in 2006, only 12% of Primary 1 students indicated they hardly or never use English at home (Ministry of Education 2007: 4). English clearly has a significant place in the everyday lives of many Singaporeans, and, contrary to the official diglossic discourse that separates language use (English is for the purposes of meeting the nation’s functional and economic needs) and language ownership (‘mother tongue’ languages are for cultural and personal identity), operates in dynamic and interactive relation with the mother tongue languages. In the first part of our chapter we will unpack the key parameters of this debate, drawing on speeches given by various government officials and documents related to the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM). In the second half of this chapter, we propose a model that nuances the meanings of English language ownership in Singapore, taking us away from the native/non-native speaker binaries and replacing the idea of ‘native speaker’. Drawing on research by Alsagoff, Bokhorst-Heng, McKay, and Rubdy (Bokhorst-Heng et al. 2007; Rubdy et al. 2008), we consider speakers’ orientations towards English norms to...