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8 Language policy and planning in Singaporean late modernity1 Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee In today’s global world, extant language policies are increasingly inadequate for managing and regulating the complex sociolinguistic dynamics of highly transforming communities characterized by pervasive transnational mobility and an extensive domestic reconstruction of social, political and economic life. This is the case for Singapore, whose late modern structure, we argue, requires an approach to the management of multilingualism that departs radically from that of the founding years of the nation. Grounded in a politics of national (re)construction and mobilization, and a concern with ethnolinguistic harmony, Singapore’s language policy was designed as a strategy for managing a multiethnic society, via a mother tongue policy that encouraged Singaporeans to be bilingual in English and an official mother tongue (i.e., a language assigned by the state as representative of a community’s ethnic identity). This policy, which is still in effect today, is based on a historically and culturally context-specific theory of governance that defined national construction and ethnic/racial harmony in terms of a particular idea of linguistic justice and the priorities that language policies ought to address, based on a specific conception of language and its relationship to individual and group identities. In this chapter, we suggest that a radically different approach to policymaking is required in late modern, multilingual societies such as Singapore. This is because the twin-poles of such societies, rescaling and consumption, are rapidly transforming the local socio-economic and linguistic landscape in ways that cannot be accommodated by conventional state-driven language policies. Rescaling refers to the process whereby socio-political units undergo various forms of realignment, giving rise to ‘new relations between scales’, thus affecting the organization of social activities and patterns of interaction (Fairclough 2006: 167). Processes of consumption, similarly, are leading to reconceptualizations of social value, especially since consumption is increasingly becoming a key channel for the construction and communication of identity (Baudrillard 1988; Giddens 1991; Beck 182 Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee 1992). The effect of these processes on the sociolinguistics of late modernity is of such magnitude that it necessitates a shift in our understanding of linguistic justice. We have chosen to illustrate our argument for a transformed language policy with details from the Singaporean context. Singapore presents an especially pertinent case study as it has a consumer culture comparable to that of advanced developed nations and all the characteristics of a society in late modernity (Chua 2003), but is coupled with a highly explicit language policy tailored to a modern nation-state. We are therefore able to point to a range of issues that the Singaporean context raises that we suspect are common to late modern societies in general. A core concern is reconciling a consumer-oriented and diasporic, mobile population with more traditional, liberal and sedentary notions of citizenship. This concern carries implications for a (re)theorization of language policy. In the concluding section, we suggest that considerations of linguistic justice in the Singaporean context require greater reference to autonomy, choice, and reflexivity — notions that seldom figure in conventional language policies. More specifically, our proposal centres around: (i) a reconceptualization of the notion of language in terms of sociolinguistic consumption; (ii) an understanding of identity as involving not only processes of recognition but also of (re)distribution (Fraser 1998); and (iii) the deconstruction of the category of mother tongue in discourses of language planning. Following a short presentation of the fundamental design characteristics of contemporary Singaporean language policy in the next section, the following section presents some of the problems that this policy is currently encountering under conditions of Singaporean late modernity.2 The third section develops the conceptual framework, and the final section concludes the chapter. Singaporean language policy Since independence in 1965, Singapore has grappled with the problem of how to manage its ethnolinguistically heterogeneous population across a range of socio-political contexts, and its mother tongue policy represents an ingenious attempt in this regard. This policy recognizes four official languages: English and three mother tongues: Malay for the Malays, Mandarin for the Chinese, and Tamil for the Indians. By recognizing three mother tongues, the policy goes a long way towards establishing a principle of interethnic parity. English is not acceptable by the state as a mother tongue on the grounds that it is a Western language, marking a non-Asian ‘Other’.3 English is deemed necessary, however, both as an interethnic [3.137.180.32] Project MUSE...

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