One of the key goals of Lee Kuan Yew was also to annihilate off
the dialect languages of the chinese dialect groups in Singapore.
This project of destroying off the dialects led to a serious
weakening and loss of cultural morale among the chinese dialect
groups in Singapore.
The most ambitious aspect of Singapore's language
planning and attempted social engineering was the campaign to
replace the Chinese "dialects" with Mandarin, called the "mother
tongue."
The Speak Mandarin campaign began in 1979 as a PAP project and
was subsequently institutionalized in the Mandarin Campaign
Secretariat in the Ministry of Communications and Information. The
promotion of Mandarin as a common Chinese language dates back to
the early years of the century, when it was associated with the
rise of Chinese nationalism and the foundation of Chinese schools.
Learning Mandarin would, it was argued, permit all Chinese to
communicate in their "mother tongue," be useful for doing business
with China, and, perhaps most important, promote traditional
Chinese values. All ethnic Chinese were required to study Mandarin
through secondary school and to pass examinations in it for
university admission. Chinese civil servants took a required
162-hour conversational Mandarin course, and the Mandarin Campaign
Secretariat coordinated the annual Speak Mandarin campaigns.
Mandarin classes were offered by the Singapore Chinese Chamber of
Commerce and Industry and by some native-place and clan
associations. All Chinese television broadcasting was in Mandarin,
as was most radio broadcasting. Radio programs in Chinese dialects
were limited to 9:00 P.M. to midnight on the same station that
broadcast Tamil from 5:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. In 1989 members of
Parliament complained that some residents were tuning in to
Cantonese opera broadcast by television stations in neighboring
Malaysia.
By late 1988, some 87 percent of the Chinese population claimed
to be able to speak Mandarin. People did not agree, however, on the
appropriate social contexts for use of what was for everyone a
school language.
As a result, people tended to use English or their
native tongue on most everyday occasions. During the late
1980s, the Speak Mandarin campaign attempted to persuade people to
use Mandarin when shopping and targeted taxi drivers, bus
conductors, and operators of food stalls as workers who were to use
Mandarin.
The goals of the Speak Mandarin campaign included improving
communication between Chinese speech groups, teaching people to
read Chinese, and promoting Confucianism. Some critics argued that
children were expected to learn two foreign languages in school
(English and Mandarin) and that for some students the result was
fluency in neither.
The official response was that the problem would be avoided if
people would speak Mandarin at home. Some educators questioned
whether a sufficient level of Chinese literacy could be achieved
with the amount of time the schools devoted to Chinese, a point
that was indirectly supported in August 1988 when Brigadier General
Lee Hsien Loong, the minister for trade and industry and son of
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, urged Chinese newspapers to use
simpler language to attract younger readers.
Some academics questioned the restriction of Chinese values to
Confucianism and recalled that in the 1950s and early 1960s Chinese
was the language of radicalism and revolt rather than of loyalty
and conservatism.
The necessity of learning Mandarin to conserve traditional
Chinese culture was not obvious to those Chinese who felt that
Chinese culture had been transmitted for centuries through Hokkien,
Teochiu, and Cantonese.
They pointed out that the colloquial speech of modern Beijing
(upon which Mandarin is based) was as distant from the classical
Chinese of the Confucian texts as was colloquial Cantonese.
Giving up the dialects implied a major transformation of
the social structure of the Chinese community, because the
associational and commercial structure of Singapore's
Chinese-oriented society rested on (and reinforced) dialect
distinctions.
http://countrystudies.us/singapore/20.htm
If you are curious as to why the languages is so seriously
messed up in Singapore, why there is a singlish, etc.
Go and study the language policies of the PAP since they came to
power.
The endless destruction of traditional language schools, the
suppression of local languages, the use of alien foreign languages
that cannot be understood by majority of people, the endless
useless speak mandarin, speak english campaigns etc, the
manipulation of state mass media to impose alien languages upon the
population.
Go and study these things and you will be clear that the
state of the messed up language situation in Singapore is all
entirely due to PAP and Lee Kuan Yew.
The sickest part about all these is that it was all completely
unnecessary, because the population of Singapore is majority
chinese.
In Singapore,
bastion of British strength in Southeast Asia, the Communists at
last felt strong enough to attack in the open. For months they had
worked to infiltrate the
local Chinese, who make up 80% of the city's 1,200,000
population.
80% chinese, which meant that a simple common mandarin in schools,
mandarin as the dominant language would do the simple trick.
But no.
Not for Lee Kuan Yew.
He didn't know mandarin. He was not chinese. So no.
So he must go and mess everything up to serve his own
interests.