I applaud Ms Nicole Chan’s interest in relearning dialect (I’m relearning my father’s dialect to preserve bonds and make new ones, Feb 13).
She pointed out rightly that the decline of dialects here is due to the Government’s policy to adopt English as the lingua franca for Singaporeans and to promote Mandarin as the common spoken language for the Chinese community here.
This language policy is necessary for social cohesion due to Singapore’s unique demographics as there is no dominant dialect group, unlike Hong Kong, in the Chinese community.
There may be a misconception that Mandarin and dialects are different languages, and that it is difficult to switch between them.
However, Mandarin and dialects share the same writing system and grammar.
The two key differences are in how the words are pronounced, and the choice of different words to deliver the same message.
For example, for the two sentences in the article, “Zung hai m sik gong gwong dong wah” and “Ngo sek teng, tong mai sek gong xiu xiu”, any non-Cantonese who can read Chinese will understand their meaning when they are written in Chinese.
While “xiu xiu” means “a little” whether in Mandarin or Cantonese, Mandarin usually uses “yi dian dian” in this context.
This is because Chinese languages have evolved over the years and dialects still retain some old ways of speaking, while written Chinese has remained the same for thousands of years.
As long as they have a basic mastery of written Chinese from school, people who are interested in picking up dialects can easily do so from written Chinese by learning the pronunciations and variations in the words to use. They will find that it is easy to switch between Mandarin and dialects.
One should not learn dialects based on Romanised words as it would be akin to learning a different language. Romanisation should be used as a tool to aid learning, similar to hanyu pinyin for Mandarin.
The clan associations can play a greater role in helping people learn dialects by developing courses based on written Chinese.
Chong Lee Ming
