Tongue-Tied in Singapore: A Language Policy for Tamil?

Abstract

The Tamil situation in Singapore is one that lends itself ideally to the study of minority-language maintenance. The Tamil community is small. Tamils constitute only 4% of the population, whereas Indians constitute around 7%. The history and demographics of the Tamil community are well known. The Singapore educational system supports a well-developed and comprehensive bilingual education program for its three major linguistic communities on an egalitarian basis, so Tamil is a sort of "test case" for how well a small language community can survive in a multilingual society where larger groups are doing well. But Tamil is acknowledged by many to be facing a number of crises. Tamil as a home language is not being maintained by the better educated, and Indian education in Singapore is also not living up to the expectations many people have for it. Educated people who love Tamil are upset that Tamil is becoming thought of as a "coolie language" and regret this very much. Because Tamil is a language characterized by extreme diglossia, there is the additional pedagogical problem of trying to maintain a language with 2 variants but with a strong cultural bias on the part of the educational establishment for maintaining the literary dialect to the detriment of the spoken one. This article examines these attempts to maintain a highly diglossic language in emigration and concludes that the well-meaning bilingual education system actually produces a situation of subtractive bilingualism.