Click here to submit your abstract to the 2024 conference now! Submissions close on 21 February, 23:59 GMT.

Mapping the Multilingual State: Impact of Policies on the Linguistic Landscape of Singapore

Although it is not uncommon for a country to have several official languages, the small island city-state of Singapore presents itself as a rather unique case study, particularly with its official policy of bilingualism. With economic pragmatism on the one hand and sociocultural developments on the other, it is perhaps by and large unsurprising that Singapore’s language policies often results in the marginalisation of language varieties considered nonstandard, with some academics noting that Singapore has gotten linguistically less diverse over the decades. However, the government’s active promotion of English and Mandarin in the past decades has seemed to only widen the gap in language use and visibility, arguably even to the detriment of the other two official languages (Malay and Tamil). As a consequence, the linguistic landscape of the city-state – both physically and in terms of public discourse – has rather drastically changed within a short span of 50 years. This consequently presents a two-fold question: What are the implications of Singapore’s language policies past decades vis-à-vis the city-state’s linguistic diversity, and what wider impact does it have on the on-going quest of nation-building, especially for a relatively young country trying to forge a common identity amongst its multi-ethnic and multilingual citizens? More importantly, what are some measures that could be taken to ensure that Singapore’s multilingual heritage would not be lost in the next fifty years? Through the use of both quantitative and qualitative data, this presentation seeks to address these issues in an interactive manner, particularly for a non-Singaporean audience.