TongueTiedinSingaporeALanguagePolicyforTamil.pptVIP

Tongue-Tied in Singapore: A Language Policy for Tamil? Harold F. Schiffman Dept. of South Asia Studies University of Pennsylvania Introduction: Tamil situation in Singapore: Lends itself ideally to the study of minority language maintenance: Tamil community is small: Indians constitute around 7% of the population, of which Tamils constitute 60%. History and demographics well known. Tamil community acknowledged to be facing a number of crises: Tamil as a home language not being maintained by the better-educated. Role of Education Schooling seen as the mainstay of language maintenance Tamil Education sine qua non of language maintenance efforts; Policy is failing, even with (now) compulsory mother tongue instruction for Chinese, Malays and Tamils. Should be cause of general alarm in Singapore, not just among Tamils. Language Maintenance and the Sociology of Language Tendency among Indian community to confuse corpus planning and status planning; Tamils traditional strategy is to emphasize corpus planning, esp. purity The housing policy in Singapore: the real culprit? What kind of Tamil do people want? Problem of diglossia: concern is always with the corpus management of the literary language; The revolutionary zeal, evangelical, rhetorical and oratorical skills of DMK mesmerized a generation of Singapore Tamils. Fervor now gone. The kind of Tamil taught has no communicative value for younger people. Some differences between Tamilnadu and Singapore Ambient language in Tamilnadu is Tamil Ambient language in Singapore is English Literacy in Tamilnadu primarily in Tamil Literacy in Singapore primarily in English Registers, varieties, levels: Tamil consists of at least five different kinds of language: peeccu tamiR:, spoken by all educated speakers; Modern literary Tamil, the language of social novels and short-stories: Older modern LT, the language of Pavanandi (thirteenth century); Medieval Tamil (the Alvars, TirukkuraL), and Sangat-tamiR, the oldest Tamil--ca