Language Planning And Policies Essay

1. INTRODUCTION

2. LANGUAGE PLANNING & POLICIES

2.1 Singapore Singapore is an Island-city microstate located at the southern end of the Malacca Straits in the Malay Peninsula (Figure 1). It is the smallest nation in Southeast Asia and a unique country where it is the only country that recognizes English as the first language in Asia. Majority of the community consists of Chinese (74%), followed by Malays (13%), Indians (9%), Eurasians, Caucasians and Asians of different origins (3%) that leads to the diversity of population. The colonial commercial practices tranformed to immigration trends that caused from the Singapore’s racial diversity. It was founded by the British colonial administrator, Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 and very

As a multilingual society, a policy of multilingualism was developed from the Republic of Singapore Independence Act of 1965. As a result, Singapore government declares four official languages which are English, Malay (National), Chinese (Mandarin) and Tamil (Hornberger & Vaish 2009). Gopinathan (1998) mentions that the multilingualism policy is to treat the languages of the different racial groups equally. Moreover, the use of English is agreed as a necessity for every purpose especially economic development and assessing technology knowledge (Rappa & Wee

However, in smaller language communities inside Singapore, other languages and varieties of languages can have similar status either complimenting or in competition with English. Generally, English has developed to become a language medium over time, from the colonial time, through the transitional period, to the most recent of the independent republic. Nowadays, English is the main language spoken at home and the first language taught at schools for Singapore. Historically, it is fascinating for English in this