Commentary: Assumptions about language and identity may not just be wrong, they can be hurtful

SINGAPORE: Whenever my family makes plans to eat at a Chinese restaurant, I brace myself for the dreaded task of making a reservation in Mandarin.

Rightly or wrongly, I assume that speaking English will result in difficulties. So, firstly I have to look up the word for “reservation” in Chinese, because I can never remember. Then I rehearse my lines aloud.

I take a few deep breaths before dialling. When a staff member picks up - sometimes sounding very irritated - I panic and my Mandarin comes out in a garble.

The long pause that follows makes me die a little inside. Then the killer blow: “Huh? Shuo shen me? (What did you say?)”

I weigh my options: Do I make another attempt to speak Chinese, or abort and ask for an English-speaking server?

If your Mandarin is as bad as mine - or if you can’t speak it at all - you can probably relate. Recent incidents that went viral in Singapore have highlighted the intricacies of language in our multicultural society, sparking spirited discussions on English proficiency as a marker of social integration and whether English should be the main language used in public.

A Malay delivery rider shared on TikTok in March that he was late on an order because he couldn’t locate the food stall - it had Chinese-only signage that he could not read.

A week before that incident, a customer took to social media to complain about an NTUC FairPrice employee not speaking English, arguing that the Mandarin-speaking employee should not be in a customer-facing role.

IS SPEAKING ENGLISH CORE TO SINGAPORE IDENTITY?

English is increasingly the default language across Singapore households. In 2020, 48.3 per cent of Singapore residents said they spoke English most frequently at home, up from 32.3 per cent in 2010.

Meanwhile, the proportion of residents who speak mother tongue languages at home has dwindled - 29.9 per cent of residents speak Mandarin; down from 35.6 per cent; 9.2 per cent speak Malay, down from 12.2 per cent; and 2.5 per cent speak Tamil, down from 3.3 per cent.

This is not at all surprising, seeing as English has been the medium of instruction in schools since the 1980s and is also the working language for businesses and government.

More Singaporeans view English proficiency as key to working and living in the country. A CNA poll found that 80 per cent of Singaporeans support having an English test as part of the citizenship application process, while 51 per cent view the ability to communicate in English as a top criterion for new citizens.

These findings were initially surprising for me; my peers and I have sometimes felt like outliers for speaking mainly English. In our school days, those of us in remedial classes were hectored by teachers for our inadequacy at mother tongue and shamed for our generational failure at bilingualism.

Friends and relatives teased us, and we sometimes got the feeling that we were somehow less Singaporean because we weren’t good at mother tongue.

Perhaps it’s not my speaking English that’s un-Singaporean - it’s my not speaking Mandarin because I’m ostensibly Chinese. Questions about where I’m from often come up - from colleagues, retail staff, hawker aunties and uncles and even tourists - whenever I do not reciprocate in Mandarin in conversations.

Indeed, for some in my Peranakan family, not knowing Mandarin is a source of pride. They pepper their speech with Hokkien and Baba Malay, and fully embrace being OCBC (orang cina bukan cina - a Chinese person that isn’t Chinese).

THE UNEASY TENSIONS BENEATH A MULTILINGUAL SOCIETY

But this fixation on identity can be discriminatory. Living in such a diverse city, we can’t help but wonder about people’s backgrounds when we meet. We pay attention to their appearance or inflections in speech - and if they’re ambiguous, make our best guess.

Though my mother is Peranakan Chinese, she usually gets mistaken for other Southeast Asian races. While it’s normally more amusing - concerned hawkers have warned her their food is not halal - she’s uncovered some ugly stereotypes.

For instance, my mum once found herself under the very watchful eye of an attendant when she was out shopping for shoes. When she asked to try on a pair, the attendant pointedly asked her, “Where is your ma’am?”, assuming my mum was a Filipino helper.

These assumptions about who we are based on how we look and the way we speak may not just be wrong, they can be hurtful.

WE ALL CAN COMPROMISE

Another quirk of Singapore’s lively language debates is the rigid views people have about how we should speak. There are camps decrying Singlish, incorrect English, and the broken mix of mother tongue and English that are all commonly used these days.

It’s strange to be pedantic about how languages are spoken - like the customer who railed against the NTUC employee for not speaking English, despite both individuals collectively knowing a bit of English and Mandarin. Language in day-to-day situations is entirely functional. If the point gets across, does it really matter how it is executed?

As some retailers in Singapore highlighted, language is usually not a barrier to business, because both staff and customers eventually find middle ground. “Singaporeans can use a lot of body language”, one sales manager said.

If Singapore was founded on the premise that we belong here regardless of language, these assumptions must change. We don’t always have to stick to principles of language and identity - we can just focus on communicating with each other.

Erin Low is Deputy Editor, Commentary at CNA Digital.