2.1The colonial era: Natural immigration and vernacular maintenance

From as early as the 14th century, Singapore – known then as Temasek – was already a critical node in the ancient Indian Ocean trading networks, along with Riau and other islands in the archipelago, the region already having seen extensive contact between sailors and traders from south, east and southeast Asia. Temasek is reported to have been inhabited at the beginning of 1819 by a few families of Orang Laut (‘sea people’ or Proto-Malays), pirates, a settlement of more than 30 Chinese cultivators of pepper and gambier, and about 100 Muslim Malay fisherfolk led by the Temenggong of Johore, who had moved there in 1811 (Bloom, 1986Bloom, D. (1986) The English language and Singapore: A critical survey. In B. K. Kapur (Ed.), Singapore studies: Critical surveys of the Humanities and Social Sciences (pp. 337–452). Singapore: Singapore University Press., p. 349).

The claiming of the island for British East India Company by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 and its establishment as a British trading post meant a rapidly expanding economy, which was coupled with a liberal, open-door immigration policy. This resulted in an even more rapid influx of immigrants, the majority of them from southern China, the Malay archipelago, and South Asia. This resulted in a heterogeneous mix of peoples, exhibiting a richness and diversity in origins and multilingual repertoires, with widespread societal multilingualism.

Immigrants from various parts of the Malay archipelago, including the Riau Islands, Malacca and Sumatra, Java and Bawean Island, as well as Sulawesi and other islands, spoke various Austronesian languages such as Javanese, Buginese, Boyanese. These ‘Malays’ also included the English-speaking Jawi-Peranakans, and a small but economically important group of Arabs (Bloom, 1986Bloom, D. (1986) The English language and Singapore: A critical survey. In B. K. Kapur (Ed.), Singapore studies: Critical surveys of the Humanities and Social Sciences (pp. 337–452). Singapore: Singapore University Press., p. 353). One dominant language in the ecology was Bazaar Malay, one of the local forms of restructured Malay, the lingua franca in the region for centuries (Adelaar & Prentice, 1996; Ansaldo, 2009Ansaldo, U. (2009) Contact languages: Ecology and evolution in Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), familiar across the Chinese and Indian communities, which served as the interethnic lingua franca in Singapore (Platt & Weber, 1980Platt, J. & Weber, H. (1980) English in Singapore and Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.; Bloom, 1986Bloom, D. (1986) The English language and Singapore: A critical survey. In B. K. Kapur (Ed.), Singapore studies: Critical surveys of the Humanities and Social Sciences (pp. 337–452). Singapore: Singapore University Press.). Even after the growth of the Chinese population, Bazaar Malay was the second most understood language, after Hokkien, in early 1970s Singapore, and was still the most important language for interethnic communication, with all Indians and 45% of the Chinese claiming to understand it.

Migration from the South Asian subcontinent similarly involved peoples who were geographically and linguistically diverse, and represented a number of different castes, each filling a niche in the early days. The largest group of immigrants were South Indian, mainly from the Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam language communities, with the Tamils in the majority.

The vast majority of the ethnic Chinese immigrants hailed from cities and provinces on the southern coast of China, mainly Xiamen in southern Fujian (the Hokkiens), Chaozhou in the east of Guangdong (the Teochews), and Guangdong itself (the Cantonese), as well as sizeable representation of Hakkas and Hainanese, and coastal counties of northern Fujian. Hokkien was the most frequently understood and spoken Chinese language (and mutually intelligible with Teochew, both being subvarieties of Southern Min), followed by Cantonese and Mandarin, up until the 1970s. It also served as the de facto lingua franca for intraethnic communication within the Chinese community (Platt & Weber, 1980Platt, J. & Weber, H. (1980) English in Singapore and Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.), which by 1840 comprised half the population. This was in no small part due to the fact that Hokkiens – in contrast with the more numerous Teochews – comprised a strong economic power in Singapore, especially from the late 1800s, establishing themselves first as traders and go-betweens, and then as importers, exporters, manufacturers and bankers, and virtually monopolising commercial activities by the end of the nineteenth century, becoming the most powerful bang ‘clan’, and playing a leading role within the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, set up in 1906, as well as within the Chinese community at large (Li et al., 1997).

This has been recognised as the age of the immigrant languages (Lim, 2010aLim, L. (2010a) Migrants and mother tongues. In L. Lim, A. Pakir & L. Wee (Eds.), English in Singapore: Modernity and management. Hong Kong University Press. , p. 42), where the vernacular language varieties of the early immigrants had greatest currency in the ecology. An individual during that period would have in their repertoire a diverse collection of language varieties, including those not necessarily associated with their ethnic group.

The period of free immigration, which lasted over a century, came to an end when the colonial government passed the 1928 Immigration Restriction Ordinance. After a dwindling during the Great Depression of the 1930s, followed by a temporary halt of migration during the Japanese occupation of Singapore (1942–45) during World War II, new immigrants came during the post-war boom years, accompanied by a new immigration ordinance which came into force in 1953 that admitted only those who could contribute to the social and economic development of Singapore (Yeoh, 2007Yeoh, B. S. A. (2007) Singapore: Hungry for foreign workers at all skill levels. Migration Information Source.).

2.2The independence era: Population stabilisation and language institutionalisation

As a result of the new immigration laws, no significant immigration took place from the early 1960s, and natural increase was the more dominant contribution to population growth, as opposed to immigration in the previous era. The Singapore-born started to form the majority, comprising three-quarters of the population by the first post-independence Census of 1970. Even with its initial overwhelmingly migrant origins, Singapore’s population had largely become naturalised within two generations, between 1931 to 1970. The non-resident migrant contribution to the workforce was minor and highly polarised by skill level, with just 3.2% of the labour force non-citizen non-residents, the overall policy intent for the first two decades after independence focused on building a full-employment economy based on upgrading the skills and capabilities of the resident labour force. (See Pan & Theseira, 2023Pan, J. & Theseira, W. (2023) Immigration in Singapore. Background paper to the World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees, and Societies , April 2023. https://​thedocs​.worldbank​.org​/en​/doc​/080a4bc64cc8a9eb8a2a0e98d97a260a​-0050062023​/original​/WDR​-Immigration​-in​-Singapore​-FORMATTED​.pdf, for a comprehensive overview).

Leading up to and at Singapore’s independence, however, Singapore’s prime minister Lee Kuan Yew felt that communication across racial lines amongst his people was limited. There certainly long existed, as mentioned above, lingue franche such as Bazaar Malay, used in inter-ethnic communication in Singapore (and in the region) since pre-colonial times, as well as Hokkien, in particular used amongst the Chinese. However English was only spoken by a small proportion of the population, namely the upper classes and communities of certain origin, such as the Eurasians and the Peranakans.

The ideology underlying the language policy and planning which ensued in the decades following – well known and documented – was “pragmatic multilingualism” (Kuo & Jernudd 1994Kuo, E. C. Y. & Jernudd, B. (1994) Balancing macro- and micro-sociolinguistic perspectives in language management: The case of Singapore. In S. Gopinathan, A. Pakir, W. K. Ho & V. Saravanan (Eds.), Language, society and education in Singapore: Issues and trends, 1st ed. (pp. 25–46). Singapore: Times Academic Press., p. 72), and the intent was clearly to position Singapore in a global space. English – the neutral non-native language not associated with any of the Asian cultures, and not the mother tongue of any of the ethnic groups – was retained as one of the official languages, already the language of governance and law, and serving as the language of science and technology and of international trade and commerce. Three ‘local’ languages were selected to represent the three official races of ‘Chinese’, ‘Malay’ and ‘Indian’ – which, alongside ‘Others’, formed the CMIO model of ethnic classification – namely, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil respectively. These official ‘Mother Tongues’ (MTs) were (and are) studied in school as a first or second language, and were meant to serve as cultural ballast and provide Asian values, to counter the anticipated impact of English, the colonial language. Most notable was the selection of Mandarin Chinese, which was far from being the language of the majority of Singapore’s Chinese population – they being primarily from the southern Chinese provinces, as mentioned previously – but which was a choice in line with the People’s Republic of China. By 1987 English was the medium of instruction in all schools, with the MTs as a second language. These four official languages were implemented in the mass media, with the suppression of all other non-official languages.

With the bilingual education programme assessed in the late 1970s as unsuccessful – the Chinese vernacular languages still being used predominantly as home languages – the Singapore government embarked on more aggressive practices. The annual Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC), launched in 1979, was designed to convince Chinese Singaporeans to shift from Chinese ‘dialects’ (as the other Chinese language varieties were and continue to be referred to in Singapore discourse) to Mandarin in all domains. The early years of the SMC focused explicitly on supporting and promoting the use of Mandarin and discouraging the use of all other Chinese varieties, the latter denigrated in official discourse by PM Lee (cited in Lim, 2009Lim, L. (2009) Beyond fear and loathing in SG: The real mother tongues and language policies in multilingual Singapore. In L. Lim & E. L. Low (Eds.), Multilingual, globalising Asia: Implications for policy and education, AILA Review 22, 52–71. , p. 55) as being “stagnant” languages, as having low cultural value and no economic value, with Singaporeans warned that to speak dialect with their child would be to “ruin his future”. (For more in-depth discussion of the SMC, see e.g. Bokhorst-Heng, 1998Bokhorst-Heng, W. D. (1998) Language planning and management in Singapore. In J. A. Foley, T. Kandiah, Z. Bao, A. F. Gupta, L. Alsagoff, C. L. Ho, L. Wee, I. Talib, & W. Bokhorst-Heng (Eds.), English in new cultural contexts: Reflections from Singapore (pp. 287–309). Singapore: Oxford University Press.; Lim, 2009Lim, L. (2009) Beyond fear and loathing in SG: The real mother tongues and language policies in multilingual Singapore. In L. Lim & E. L. Low (Eds.), Multilingual, globalising Asia: Implications for policy and education, AILA Review 22, 52–71. .)

Such aggressive institutionalisation of certain languages over others and active implementation of language policies and practices resulted in dramatic changes in the language practices of Singaporeans and consequently an immediate and long-reaching impact11.Statistics here derive from census data distilled in Lim & Foley, 2004; Lim, 2007Lim, L. (2007) Mergers and acquisitions: On the ages and origins of Singapore English particles. World Englishes 27(4): 446–473. , 2009Lim, L. (2009) Beyond fear and loathing in SG: The real mother tongues and language policies in multilingual Singapore. In L. Lim & E. L. Low (Eds.), Multilingual, globalising Asia: Implications for policy and education, AILA Review 22, 52–71. , 2010aLim, L. (2010a) Migrants and mother tongues. In L. Lim, A. Pakir & L. Wee (Eds.), English in Singapore: Modernity and management. Hong Kong University Press. ; and Bolton & Ng, 2014Bolton, K. & Ng, B. C. (2014) The dynamics of multilingualism in contemporary Singapore. World Englishes 33(3), 307–318. . on Singapore’s linguistic ecology during this era.

As a result of compulsory education in English, the proportion of the population having English as a dominant home language increased dramatically from 1.8% in 1957 to 11.6% in 1980, then doubling within 2 decades to 23% in 2000, then increasing steadily to 32.3% in 2010. Notably it is the younger generation who was acquiring English swiftly: in 2000, 70% of Primary 1 children (aged six years) reported having English as a dominant home language. English literacy increased from less than half the population in 1970 to some three-quarters of the population 30 years on, in 2000. By the late 1970s to the early 1980s, English started displacing Hokkien and Bazaar Malay as lingua franca, especially among the younger and more educated.

Where the Chinese languages were concerned, the bilingual policy, coupled with the SMC, had a similarly significant impact: Mandarin clearly displaced the other Chinese languages as the main home language in Chinese households over the decades, from 13% in 1980 to 48% in 2010, with concomitant decrease in the use of the Chinese vernaculars from 76% in 1980 to 19% in 2010. Some 87% of the Chinese population claimed to be able to understand Mandarin by 1988, and it has become the language of choice for many younger Chinese Singaporeans’ intra-ethnic communication in all domains.

In effect, language policy – underscored by a politics of erasure (Lim, 2022Lim, L. (2022) Defining migrants: Positioning the periphery in pioneering and pandemic times. Invited plenary panel on Mobility, Multilingualism, and Multimodality: Studies in Migration Linguistics in Southeast Asia, 21st English in Southeast Asia conference. Multilingualism, Multimodality, and Multiliteracies: Trends, Challenges, and Prospects, Linguistic Society of the Philippines and the Ateneo de Manila University, 10–12 March 2022.) – was one of the major factors that changed the ecology of Singapore in the early postcolonial period (Lim, 2010aLim, L. (2010a) Migrants and mother tongues. In L. Lim, A. Pakir & L. Wee (Eds.), English in Singapore: Modernity and management. Hong Kong University Press. ). Linguistic diversity was considered incompatible with goals of nation building, and the multiplicity of Chinese ‘dialects’ considered a hindrance to development of common culture. Policy overtly elevated the status of a few languages above others, making these languages dominant in formal domains. This in turn impacted on language choice in personal domains such as the home, and led to two significant patterns of language shift – an increased use of English across all races, and in the Chinese population a significant shift from the original southern Sinitic languages to Mandarin. Overall, this meant that in a short period of time, Singapore had a population of people, at least in the younger generations, who were English-knowing bilinguals, and notably, bilingual in Singapore’s official Mother Tongues. In other words, this is the era where the official languages which represent the official CMIO races in Singapore – those associated with “higher-order ethnicity” (Gupta, 2001, p. 5) – attained prominence, and started displacing the other languages which were in fact languages of the actual separate and original dialect groups (“lower-order ethnicity”, Gupta, 2001, p. 5), and which, poignantly, were essentially the real mother tongues of the population (Lim, 2009Lim, L. (2009) Beyond fear and loathing in SG: The real mother tongues and language policies in multilingual Singapore. In L. Lim & E. L. Low (Eds.), Multilingual, globalising Asia: Implications for policy and education, AILA Review 22, 52–71. ).

2.3The late modernity era: Foreign manpower and invisible languages

The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a foreign labour policy shift, a response, on the one hand, to its less-than-replacement fertility rate by the 1970s, with implications for serving a rapidly growing economy, and, on the other hand, to Singapore’s declining comparative advantage in lower- to medium-skill industries which had driven its economic development in the 1960s and 1970s, exacerbated by the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Singapore’s new competitive paradigm was thus to be a knowledge-based economy – this involved a policy involving “gathering talent”, that is, attracting and recruiting highly skilled workers globally, as well as attracting high-potential students to Singapore though scholarship programs for local institutions and establishing a hub for international universities. In addition, this was supported by a naturalisation policy which grants permanent residence to the high-skilled, economically active migrant worker population. These new sources of social diversity – viz. attracting “foreign talent”, investing in “foreign students”, and turning to “foreign spouses” (Yeoh, 2007Yeoh, B. S. A. (2007) Singapore: Hungry for foreign workers at all skill levels. Migration Information Source.) – have tended to encompass migrants primarily from India, Philippines, People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, UK, US.

Of particular significance to this article are the foreign manpower at the low end of the spectrum, namely the “foreign workers”, the semi-skilled or unskilled workers mainly in the manufacturing, construction, and domestic services sectors – jobs which Singaporeans, in the affluence of recent decades, have been reluctant to fill. Sourced from China, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, and Cambodia, these low-skilled migrants comprise the majority of the foreign workforce, comprising more than 60% in 2009 (declining to 50% in 2021), with foreign female domestic helpers accounting for about 15% (more than 230,000 in 2015).

With the Singapore government having the view that too much permanent, low-skilled migration is disruptive to society, the immigration policy imposed since the 1970s maintains such low- and unskilled migrants as a transient workforce (Yeoh, 2007Yeoh, B. S. A. (2007) Singapore: Hungry for foreign workers at all skill levels. Migration Information Source.). This is achieved via a series of measures, including the regulation of the proportion of foreign to local workers, and the work-permit system, by which foreign workers are only allowed to work for the employer and in the occupation as reflected in the work permit, with employment contracts of a maximum of two years (subject to a one-off renewal), and therefore cannot gain access to the local labour market. Foreign workers are also subject to repatriation during periods of economic downturn, or in the case of females, upon becoming pregnant. Furthermore, they are not allowed to bring their spouses and children with them, nor can they marry Singaporeans or permanent residents (PRs). Part of the management of this labour force has been on the basis of demographic fit with Singapore’s society; thus a clear differentiation is made between “traditional source” workers, referring initially to workers of Malaysian origin, and “non-traditional sources”, referring to Asian countries further afield such as the Philippines and Bangladesh.

Significantly, these communities – and thus their languages – have tended to be rendered invisible in Singapore’s ecology, a situation that came particularly into sharp focus in the pandemic (e.g. Kaur-Gill, 2020Kaur-Gill, S. (2020) The COVID-19 pandemic and outbreak inequality: Mainstream reporting of Singapore’s migrant workers in the margins. Frontiers in Communication 5, 30 September 2020. ; Lin & Yeoh, 2021Lin, W. & Yeoh, B. S. A. (2021) Pathological (im)mobilities: Managing risk in a time of pandemics. Pandemic (Im)Mobilities, Mobilities 16(1), 96–112. https://​www​.tandfonline​.com​/doi​/full​/10​.1080​/17450101​.2020​.1862454. ), as will be discussed further in the next section.

3.1In times of celebration

A special milestone in modern Singapore’s history was certainly the nation’s golden jubilee, its 50th National Day celebrations (SG50) in August 2015. The death of Singapore’s first and longest serving prime minister and founding father Lee Kuan Yew in April of that year, coupled with the SG50 celebrations, contributed to a groundswell of sentimentality, and a harking back to heritage (Lim, 2015Lim, L. (2015) Coming of age, coming full circle: English and multilingualism in Singapore at 50. Asian Englishes 17(3), 261–270. ). This held significant implications for language policy and practice, with regard to, on the one hand, the older migrants, with implications for their vernacular languages in terms of access and appropriation, and, on the other hand, to the emergent restructured variety of English which had evolved in Singapore’s ecology.

At the level of the state, SG50 involved explicit recognition of and tributes to those who were considered, in SG50 discourse, the “Pioneer Generation” – those who would have been 16 years and above at Singapore’s independence (who in 2014 comprised Singaporeans aged 65 years and above), who would have been the ones persevering and making significant contributions to Singapore’s development and progress through the difficult pioneering years.

In the lead-up to SG50, the government introduced the Pioneer Generation Package (PGP), which focused on healthcare benefits and provided medical subsidies to 450,000 Singaporeans born in 1949 and earlier. The details of the PGP were initially conveyed in Singapore’s 4 official languages (Ministry of Health, 2021Ministry of Health, Government of Singapore (2021) Pioneer Generation Package. https://​www​.moh​.gov​.sg​/healthcare​-schemes​-subsidies​/pioneer​-generation​-package). However, the majority of the pioneer generation would not have been impacted by the post-independence language policies outlined in Section 2.2: the older Chinese generation remained speakers of their original Chinese vernaculars, even while the younger generations became Mandarin speakers. With some 70% of the pioneer generation not understanding the official material of the PGP, the Ministry of Communications and Information subsequently produced official videos in Hokkien, Cantonese and Teochew, the main Chinese “dialects”, in order for the scheme to be explained to older citizens. By extension – though not by design – the celebrating of the “pioneer generation” during SG50 also meant an endorsing of those “pioneer languages” (Lim, 2022Lim, L. (2022) Defining migrants: Positioning the periphery in pioneering and pandemic times. Invited plenary panel on Mobility, Multilingualism, and Multimodality: Studies in Migration Linguistics in Southeast Asia, 21st English in Southeast Asia conference. Multilingualism, Multimodality, and Multiliteracies: Trends, Challenges, and Prospects, Linguistic Society of the Philippines and the Ateneo de Manila University, 10–12 March 2022., author’s term), that is, the original vernacular language varieties.

In similar vein, with the goal of reaching out to their target pioneer generation audience on matters of well-being through edutainment, television programmes were produced in 2016–2017 by the Ministry of Communications and Information and Mediacorp, including series addressing government policies and social issues, entitled Jiak Ba Buay (Hokkien for ‘eat already’) and issues of healthcare and retirement, entitled, Happy Can Already! (Singlish for something like ‘if you’re happy, the situation is satisfactory’). Notably, these were produced in Hokkien, Cantonese, and Teochew.

The irony of this must surely be appreciated: in contrast with the politics of erasure of earlier decades, the new millennium saw these early vernacular languages – the pioneer languages – given official recognition and support – in a new politics of heritage.

Another instructive phenomenon is found in a particular group of older migrants, namely the Peranakan community, who had shifted from their original vernacular, Baba Malay, to be early adopters of English in Singapore – the inclusion of such a language in their repertoire, along with other socioeconomic circumstances, afforded the community significant opportunities in access to capital, and mobility, in colonial and early postcolonial Singapore. Later, in the 20th-century ecology, the earlier access and appropriation afforded a renewed cultural vitality, and an official endorsement as “multiracial emblems of [Singapore’s] social mix”. (Space does not permit a detailed discussion of this group, but see Lim, 2010bLim, L. (2010b) Peranakan English in Singapore. In D. Schreier, P. Trudgill, E. W. Schneider & J. P. Williams (Eds.), The lesser-known varieties of English: An introduction (pp. 327–347). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 2020Lim, L. (2020) Im/Mobilities. In U. Ansaldo & M. Meyerhoff (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Pidgin and Creole languages (pp. 335–347). London/ New York: Routledge. , 2022Lim, L. (2022) Defining migrants: Positioning the periphery in pioneering and pandemic times. Invited plenary panel on Mobility, Multilingualism, and Multimodality: Studies in Migration Linguistics in Southeast Asia, 21st English in Southeast Asia conference. Multilingualism, Multimodality, and Multiliteracies: Trends, Challenges, and Prospects, Linguistic Society of the Philippines and the Ateneo de Manila University, 10–12 March 2022.; Lim & Ansaldo 2021Lim, L. & Ansaldo, U. (2021) Foundings and futures: How to live like a Peranakan in the post-digital ecology. In E. O. Aboh & C. B. Vigoroux (Eds.), Variation rolls the dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene (pp. 243–267). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. .)

An interesting counterpoint to the early generations’ “pioneer languages” was the new value awarded to the emergent restructured variety of English, Singapore English, also widely referred to as Singlish. In the decade and a half prior, via the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) annual language campaign, launched in 2000, Singlish had been explicitly denigrated, and pitched against “Good English”. During SG50, Singlish – though not an original vernacular – also received ratification as a language of heritage of Singapore in this period (Lim, 2015Lim, L. (2015) Coming of age, coming full circle: English and multilingualism in Singapore at 50. Asian Englishes 17(3), 261–270. ).

Commercial ventures were earliest in the uptake of commodification of languages of heritage: early examples during this period are found in a local art and design store producing “Strangely Singaporean”-themed products using Singlish terms and phrases such as cheem (Hokkien ‘profound’), blur like sotong (‘extremely confused’; sotong Malay ‘squid’) and kiasu (Hokkien ‘afraid to lose out’).

More marked, and significant, was the recognition of Singlish in official spaces. Singlish terms such as gahmen ‘government’ and cheem (Hokkien ‘profound’) were used in 2015 on the Singapore government’s official Twitter account @govsingapore:

They say gahmen use our CPF money to invest overseas. Real or not? Find out what the gahmen has to say on sg.sg/CPFnU.

Most significantly, underscoring the place it has in the current ecology, Singlish was featured in the nation’s National Day Parade in 2015. In the segment “Identity – Uniquely Singapore”, in addition to floats depicting Singaporean food (such as ice kachang) and dances to tunes synonymous with Singapore’s television shows and campaigns, there were also props depicting Singlish, such as particles lah and leh, and phrases such as blur like sotong. Even more significant was the explicit endorsement by Singapore’s leader. One week after National Day (15 August 2015), the incumbent prime minister Lee Hsien Loong – son of the Prime Minister who had previously officially discouraged the use of Singlish – posted on his Facebook page a comment accompanying a photo of these props:

These props were crowd favourites at the National Day Parade. / I’m glad that at 50, we are less “blur like sotong”, and more confident and comfortable with everything that makes us Singaporean.

3.2In times of crisis

In societies across the world, inequity amongst languages came to be starkly underscored during the COVID19 pandemic, with multilingual crisis communication recognised as a global challenge (Piller et al., 2020Piller, I., Zhang, J. & Li, J. (2020) Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multilingua 39(5). ; Borlongan, 2022bBorlongan, A. M. (2022b) Language issues of migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic: Reimagining migrant (linguistic) integration programs in (post-)pandemic times. Journal of English and Applied Linguistics. ).

In Singapore, official public health messaging, such as that by the Ministry of Health, reverted to producing material solely in the 4 official languages, English, Chinese [sic], Malay, and Tamil, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) with Singapore’s migrant worker populations, however, in particular in the early phases of the pandemic, was slow to develop. The situation was particularly accentuated with the large, diverse communities of male migrant workers who originate primarily from Bangladesh, India, and China, working in construction, manufacturing, marine, or cleaning industries, numbering some 700,000, living in high-density accommodation (Ministry of Health, 2020Ministry of Health (2020, August). Updates on COVID-19 local situation report. https://​moh​.gov​.sg​/covid​-19​/situation​-report). Some 323,000 reside in purpose-built barracks- and apartment-style dormitories, each building accommodating up to 25,000 residents, with 6 to 32 residents per unit (Chia et al., 2020Chia, M. L., Chau, D. H., Lim, K. S., Liu, C. W., Tan, H. K., Tan, Y. R. (2020) Managing COVID-19 in a novel, rapidly deployable community isolation quarantine facility. Annals of Internal Medicine 174(2): 247–251. ; Ministry of Manpower, 2021aMinistry of Manpower (2021a, March 30). Foreign workforce numbers. https://​www​.mom​.gov​.sg​/documents​-and​-publications​/foreign​-workforce​-numbers, bMinistry of Manpower (2021b, June 14). Housing for foreign workers. https://​www​.mom​.gov​.sg​/passes​-and​-permits​/work​-permit​-for​-foreign​-worker​/housing; Urban Redevelopment Authority, 2021Urban Redevelopment Authority (2021, June 15). Independent workers’ dormitories. https://​ura​.gov​.sg​/corporate​/guidelines​/development​-control​/non​-residential​/c​-ci​/wd; Zhuo, 2020Zhuo, T. (2020, August 8). Long and hard battle to clear worker dorms of Covid-19. The Straits Times. https://​www​.straitstimes​.com​/singapore​/long​-and​-hard​-battle​-to​-clear​-worker​-dorms​-of​-covid​-19). After Singapore’s first COVID19 case was identified in January 2020, COVID-19 spread widely amongst migrant workers in dormitories. By August 2020, migrant workers comprised 94.6% of the 55,661 laboratory-confirmed COVID19 cases in Singapore (Chia et al., 2020Chia, M. L., Chau, D. H., Lim, K. S., Liu, C. W., Tan, H. K., Tan, Y. R. (2020) Managing COVID-19 in a novel, rapidly deployable community isolation quarantine facility. Annals of Internal Medicine 174(2): 247–251. ; Ministry of Manpower, 2021cMinistry of Manpower (2021c, January 1). Efforts to ensure well-being of foreign workers at S11 dormitory @ Punggol and Westlite Toh Guan. https://​www​.mom​.gov​.sg​/newsroom​/press​-releases​/2020​/0406​-efforts​-to​-ensure​-well​-being​-of​-foreign​-workers​-at​-s11​-dormitory​-punggol​-and​-westlite​-toh​-guan). RCCE activities among the large, diverse communities of migrant workers living in high-density accommodation were acknowledged to have been poorly coordinated, with early strategies communicated with difficulty due to language barriers and lack of communication resources (Tam et al., 2021Tam, W. J., Gobat, N., Hemavathi, D. & Fisher, D. (2021) Risk communication and community engagement during the migrant worker COVID-19 outbreak in Singapore. Science Communication 44(2), 240–251. https://​journals​.sagepub​.com​/doi​/full​/10​.1177​/10755470211061513).

In the early days then, it fell to the grassroots and subaltern action to manage the multilingual resources required for this sector of Singapore society that fell outside Singapore’s official language policies and practices.

One early and notable resource was produced overnight in April 2020 by a National University of Singapore medicine graduate, who, together with her parents and sister, created a free English-Bengali translation website to help healthcare workers communicate better with Bangladeshi patients, providing Bengali translations of common phrases for checking COVID19 symptoms, medical history, and past interactions (Sudesna, 2023Sudesna (2023) COVID19-related translations (Bengali). https://​sudesnaroychowdhury​.wixsite​.com​/covid), illustrated in Figure 2. This resource was shared widely across multiple chat groups and Telegram doctors, including the Army Medical Services (CNA Insider, 2020Channel News Asia Insider (2020) She builds COVID-19 translator to help doctors treat foreign workers in Singapore. Channel News Asia, 19 April 2020. https://​www​.channelnewsasia​.com​/cnainsider​/covid​-19​-nus​-medical​-graduate​-bengali​-translators​-workers​-765181; Youthopia, 2020Youthopia (2020) Singaporean creates a Bengali translation website to help healthcare workers and affected migrant workers. Youthopia. https://​youthopia​.sg​/read​/singaporean​-creates​-a​-bengali​-translation​-website​-to​-help​-healthcare​-workers​-and​-affected​-migrant​-workers/).

Such a resource swiftly inspired other free translation resources to support communication in languages relevant to Singapore migrant workers, including Translatefor.sg (Keerthi, 2020Keerthi, G. (2020) Migrant worker translations for COVID-19. better.sg. https://​better​.sg​/blog​/tools​/migrant​-worker​-translations​-for​-covid​-19/; Translatefor.sg, 2020Translatefor.sg (2020) https://​translatefor​.sg [link no longer appropriate]), which encompassed a large number of languages, including Burmese, Hindi, Telugu, Tagalog, and Vietnamese (see Figures 3 and 4), and Visualaid.sg (VisualAid, 2020VisualAid (2020) https://​visualaid​.sg/), comprising a resource site of illustrated translations that can be used as flashcards by healthcare workers.

In contrast, and underscoring the line dividing migrants and citizens, Government videos through 2020 and 2021 providing pandemic-related instruction and encouragement featured Singlish-speaking local TV character Phua Chu Kang using tried-and-true Singlish lexicon (see Image 1). This practice harks back to the music videos also featuring this Singlish-speaking character which were produced during the SARS pandemic in 2003. Lyrics suggested that Singaporeans be less kiasu (Hokkien ‘afraid to lose out > selfish’), and make sure they belanja (Malay ‘ to treat’) frontline workers to a bowl of mee rebus (a common noodle soup dish), provided instructions to guard against fake news (“First don’t kan cheong, don’t be confused / Check the source then share the news”), urged Singaporeans against hoarding (“Shop at the market / Don’t be kiasu / Just buy what you need / Don’t jam the queue”), and to respect frontline staff (“Our frontline workers don’t play play / They give their all every day”). These together formed a collective resource of knowledge and skills, made accessible to speakers of Singlish.

Image 1.Screenshot from music video on Gov.sg, the official online communication platform of the Singapore Government, featuring Singlish-speaking character Phua Chu Kang (Gov.sg, 2021Gov.sg (2021 May 2). Get your shot, steady pom pi pi. [Video]. YouTube. https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=Cf2T3YgyaHA)

In short, the country’s response to COVID-19 manifested a clear prioritising in terms of language choice in public health communication, which underscored an unevenness in access to resources amongst different transnational groups, and thus to capital and to citizenship rights.