SINGAPORE – There is a difference between learning a language for functional purposes, and learning it along with the culture and values that can be transferred from one generation to another, said Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office Maliki Osman on Saturday.
The Government’s stance towards mother tongue language learning is more of the latter, where it wants to ensure that the values and culture remain as vibrant and as intact as they are now, along with the heritage and history that come with the language, he added at a panel discussion on bilingualism.
Dr Maliki, who is also Second Minister for Education, was responding to a question from the audience about whether Singapore should move away from having mother tongue languages assigned according to race.
“We don’t want a generation three generations down the road who just learn the language for the sake of the language and not really understand the history behind those sayings, those words… So we need to make sure that we are proud of our history, culture and heritage. And I think that can only be done through the language that we are born with,” he said.
The discussion was part of the inaugural Bilingualism Carnival held at community hub One Punggol in Punggol Drive and organised by SPH Media.
The focus of the panel was on encouraging the use of mother tongue languages at home from young.
The other panellists were Ms Tay Kewei, a singer-songwriter who writes in English and Chinese, as well as Ms Usha Kumaran and Ms Razmiah Banu, who co-founded Chellamey Books to publish Tamil-language interactive books for children.
The session was moderated by Ms Tan Leng Tuan, young audience editor with the Chinese Media Group at SPH Media.
Responding to a question on how to ensure bilingualism if parents are not familiar with their mother tongue language, Dr Maliki said parents should view it also as an opportunity for themselves to always be learning.
Ms Usha said Singaporeans should not be so hard on themselves if they are not as fluent as they would like to be in their mother tongue when trying to encourage their kids to embrace its usage.
She added that she frequently sees people from the same community ridiculing each other if the person’s language proficiency is not that good. This will discourage the person further and stop him from using it at all, she said.
When asked about how technology has helped with promoting bilingualism, Ms Razmiah said it has given parents access to resources that they may not have known about before. For example, she found out that there were Tamil shops online that had free downloadable material that she could use with her two young children.
While there may be concerns about screen time for younger children, there are ways to put it to good use.
Ms Tay said that when her children showed a love for popular Disney songs such as Let It Go from Frozen, she introduced them to the Mandarin version of it. When her children watch the popular Paw Patrol show on Netflix, she would change the language to Mandarin.
Dr Maliki added: “It’s useful for us to embrace technology, but not... assume that technology alone can solve the challenges that we have in encouraging bilingualism.”
