Mother Tongue Language

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Topic: A person should be able to choose his or her own mother tongue language in a multilingual society (Singapore). Thesis: Singapore is a multilingual society where mother tongues are state assigned based on race. One should not be pigeonholed into a specific mother tongue based on the social group they were born into, but be able to decide which they are more suited for. The supporting reasons are: 1. People born into multilingual environments should not be pigeonholed into a single mother tongue. In this context, their affiliation and inclination to certain languages may be stronger than the one supposedly inherited. (Rampton, 1995) 2. The globalization of languages has shifted the importance of some and brought to contention others. …show more content…

In contrast with the viewpoint of culture as something static, derived by the common ways of interaction and living, and ‘people’s ways of making sense of their lives’ (Pennycook 1994: 66) Grappling with this notion, the act of assigning mother tongue languages to ethnic communities reveals a sort of contradiction (Wee, 2006). Corroborating Alsagoff’s argument, Wee (2006) illustrates that by giving mother tongue languages the role of a cultural archive, this in fact erases Singapore’s identity as a society of immigrants. Therefore, the former implies that the labeling of mother tongue languages to distinct ethnic groups is in itself a violation of the Singaporean multicultural …show more content…

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