Synopsis
Singapore has been taken by many researchers as a fascinating living language policy and planning laboratory. Language and education policy in Singapore has been pivotal not only to the establishment and growth of schooling, but to the very project of nation building. Since their inception, ‘mother tongue’ policies have been established with two explicit goals. Firstly there is the development and training of human and intellectual capital for the expansion and networking of a Singaporean service and information economy. Secondly there is the maintenance of cultural heritage and values as a means for social cohesion and, indeed, the maintenance of community and regional social capital. These tasks have been fraught with tension and contradiction, both in relation to the conditions of rapid cultural, economic and political change in Asia and globally, but as well because of the tensions between the so called ‘world language English’ and Singapore’s three other official languages, Tamil, Malay and Mandarin. This has been complicated, of course, by the challenges of vibrant regional dialects and the emergence of Singlish as a powerful medium of community life.
About the Author
Viniti Vaish is Assistant Professor at Singapore? s Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP), National Institute of Education. She has worked in different capacities in India, the USA and Singapore. Her research interests include bilingual and comparative education, pedagogy and language policy. Currently she is Co-Principal Investigator of ? The Sociolinguistic Survey of Singapore, 2006? , a large scale language survey linked to smaller scale follow up studies, which is one of the projects undertaken by CRPP. She has published in Language Policy, the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and the International Journal of Multilingualism.
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