Multilingual Global Cities

Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai

Peter Siemund, Jakob R.E. Leimgruber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429873904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume sets out to investigate the linguistic ecologies of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai, with chapters that combine empirical and theoretical approaches to the sociolinguistics of multilingualism. One important feature of this publication is that the five parts of the collection deal with such key issues as the historical dimension, language policies and language planning, contemporary societal multilingualism, multilingual language acquisition, and the localized Englishes of global cities. The first four sections of the volume provide a multi-levelled and finely-detailed description of multilingual diversity of three global cities, while the final section discusses postcolonial Englishes in the context of multilingual language acquisition and language contact.

1 The multilingual ecologies of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai

Jakob R. E. Leimgruber and Peter Siemund

Introduction

Every place has its own history, but, even though the contemporary global cities of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai have followed their own specific trajectories, their historical developments have produced important commonalities. All three cities harbour extensive non-indigenous populations, they have risen to prosperity over the past one hundred years, their populations are multilingual, they share a history of British governance, and English is a language in the public domain that is showing signs of local nativization, albeit to different degrees. The three cities are presented here in the chronological order of their rise to prominence in the era of the British Empire: Singapore (1819), Hong Kong (1842), and Dubai (1892).

Singapore is now home to primarily three ethnic groups: Chinese, Malays, and Indians. They speak different languages and dialects affiliated with their respective ethnicities, but English enjoys near-universal use among speakers of the four official languages of Singapore (Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, English). English in Singapore shows clear signs of nativization, and Singaporeans have generally developed positive attitudes towards local norms of usage. A ‘barren island’ in the sea, Hong Kong ended its colonial history only recently and now offers a complex linguistic texture in which English, Putonghua, and Cantonese compete for attention and speakers. ¹ English is firmly implanted in the territory due to its colonial past and its current status as a global hub language, while Cantonese is the local Chinese language, and more and more Putonghua is being used because of the political influence of Beijing. Hong Kong English is clearly recognizable, but less nativized and less universally used than Singapore English. Although its British past is very different from Singapore and Hong Kong, Dubai provides another example of an English-speaking global city. British interests essentially saw Dubai as an appropriate location to pacify local pirates who interfered with British trade routes to India, but Western values and the English language stayed and developed an unforeseeable prominence in the area. Despite that, it is too early to talk of a local norm of Dubai or Gulf English and it remains to be seen if it will ever develop. Even though English is rapidly gaining ground as the language of the public sphere, the local Arab and various non-indigenous populations largely live in different neighbourhoods where they use their respective native tongues. Moreover, the non-indigenous populations are highly transient so that new international forms of English are constantly heard, especially Indian, Philippine, and African Englishes.

The present volume offers assessments of multilingual developments in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai from the perspective of English as a world language. The contributions trace the history of English and the local languages in the relevant areas, the language policies pursued and implemented by the respective governments, the multilingual texture in the public sphere, the observable language shifts from the indigenous languages towards English, and the development of local English norms including the attitudes towards them. It is arguably the first comparative volume on post-imperial English-speaking global cities and assembles expert opinions and assessments from the three areas. In this introductory chapter, we attempt to disentangle the differences and similarities of multilingual development in the three cities and work towards a better understanding of the position of English in the sociolinguistics of globalization.

Part I: Socio-historical perspectives

The three cities compared here all started as insignificant fishing settlements, albeit in locations that turned out to be of strategic importance for the then superpower of the British Empire. Singapore is the city with the longest history of urbanization, followed by Hong Kong only a little more than two decades later. Dubai is one of the most recent additions to the set of global, multilingual cities in areas formerly under British control. Singapore and Hong Kong were bona fide colonies, whereas the status of the territories that amalgamated into the UAE was that of a protectorate. Dubai achieved the development from an agrarian society to a high-tech international metropolis in just a few decades. While none of these societies was ever truly monolingual, it is certainly the case that the multilingualism found in the numerically small indigenous populations in pre-colonial times was one very different from that seen in today’s large globalized cities.

Immediately after being designated British territory in 1819, Singapore developed a multilingual society with the local Malay population being quickly augmented by Chinese immigrants hailing from Southern China (mainly Fujian, Guangdong, and Hainan) and earlier established colonial possessions such as Penang and Malacca (especially Peranakans from here). In addition, the British colonizers relocated people from their possessions in India to bolster the local labour force. Bao Zhiming (this volume) argues that today’s English-centric bilingualism can be traced back to this initial foundation period, since even the early colonization period saw the emergence of policy measures that assigned the native languages to their specific ethnic groups (Chinese for the Chinese, Malay for the Malays, and Tamil for the Indians) and the use of English for business, administration, and general education. The newly set up English-medium schools contributed to the development of the local vernacular form of English (Platt, 1975, p. 3), although widespread English-medium education was only established after independence. The Chinese languages of early Singapore included various Southern Chinese languages (Cantonese, Hainanese, Hakka, Hokkien, and Teochew), and not Mandarin, as it does today. Still, the massive shift towards Mandarin that can be attributed to the Speak Mandarin Campaign initiated in 1979 finds precursors in ‘grass-roots’ movements during earlier colonial times. Interestingly, the much less successful Speak Good English Movement (starting in 2000), which proactively discouraged the use of the vernacular form of English (Singlish), was equally foreshadowed during colonial times. Before independence, the Chinese community was split into Chinese-educated and English-educated groups with today’s indexical meanings of the languages (English as modern and Chinese as traditional) already perceptible. The double language shift that the Chinese community has been going through has created substantial tension and anxiety in relation to language, ethnic identity, and values (‘linguistic angst’ according to Bao, this volume).

Hong Kong commenced its multilingual history as a small fishing village on the South China coast (see Bolton and Lee, this volume). Its Chinese population spoke different Chinese dialects, including Cantonese, Hakka, and Fukien. Hong Kong Island became a colony of the British empire after the First Opium War in 1842, which was extended to Kowloon Peninsula after the Second Opium War in 1860. In a similar fashion to Singapore, Hong Kong quickly developed into an important commercial centre attracting sizable labour from neighbouring Guangdong Province where Cantonese was spoken, and Cantonese has remained the most widely spoken language in the city ever since. As described in Bolton and Lee (this volume), Cantonese was widely used in many aspects of life, including business and education, and, traditionally, schools taught the Chinese classics through the Cantonese medium. English, likewise, became an important language in these domains, as well as in the colonial administration. Bilingualism in Cantonese and English developed and tension between Chinese-medium and English-medium instruction appeared relatively soon. From 1941 to 1945, Hong Kong was under Japanese occupation and – as in Taiwan – Japanese was declared the official language. This officially sanctioned coexistence of Cantonese and English underwent a realignment on 1st of July 1997, when Hong Kong was reunited with China and designated a Special Administrative Region (‘One Country, Two Systems’ policy). With Putonghua being added to the city’s language mix, a new functional distribution and balance of languages developed that is still being negotiated today. In a nutshell, Cantonese can be viewed as the current local solidarity code, while English and Putonghua score high along the power dimension and are learned and maintained for practical and official reasons, offering business opportunities with the West and mainland China, respectively.

The multilingual history of Dubai and the UAE is relatively young. Only one hundred years ago, the seven emirates that constitute today’s federation (Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al Quwain) were no more than a collection of small communities that engaged in fishing and pearling, though also in farming in the oases and fertile Eastern territories. One might assume that the tip of the Arabian peninsula was home to speakers of varieties of colloquial Arabic that later coalesced into present-day Emirati/Gulf Arabic. Knowledge of Persian must have been common amongst tradesmen, as what is today Iran (formerly Persia) is located just across the Arabian or Persian Gulf. British interest in the region can be traced back to the early nineteenth century and, again, one can assume that some knowledge of English started to disseminate as a consequence of the relevant encounters. The UAE became a sovereign state in 1971, and due to the discovery of oil and the far-sighted investment of the revenues into infrastructure projects, urban development virtually sky-rocketed. The Western coastal strip saw extensive and rapid urbanization, substantial international investment, and the influx of massive foreign labour, especially from Asia, quickly led to a dense multilingual ecology in which communication between the different groups was and still is smoothed by English. For instance, Dubai commenced its development with merely 1,500 inhabitants in 1833, increasing it to 10,000 in 1900, and to 370,788 by 1985 (Pacione, 2005, p. 257). Its number of inhabitants rose to 689,420 in 1995, 862,387 in 2000, and the city counted 1,529,792 people only seven years later (Government of Dubai, 2007, p. 45). The 2018 estimate reports a population number of 3,192,275 (Government of Dubai, 2019). As much as 90% of Dubai’s population are foreigners, who work in the oil industry, in the wholesale and retail trades, and the entire service sector. They primarily come from India (51%), Pakistan (17%), Bangladesh (9%), and the Philippines (3%) (Dubai Population, 2017). They speak Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, and Tagalog, but also bring their own varieties of English to the UAE. Western expatriates from North America, Great Britain, Europe, and Australia are mainly found in the business sector. The local Emirati population, thus, is quite small, and, as Irene Theorodopoulou (this volume) explains, forms three groups, namely ‘pure’ Arabs who claim extensive ancestry on the Arabian peninsula, the Ayam who are of Persian origin, and descendants of Iranians as well as other Arabs. The ruling families belong to the first group and practically own the entire country. In principle, a sizeable number of languages are currently being mixed in the UAE in what can be seen as a big global dialect laboratory, though, in actual practice, the different ethnic and linguistic groups live in rather segregated and gated communities, there being only modest interaction between them outside the work sphere.

Part II: Language policies and language planning

Both Singapore and Hong Kong were equipped with implicit and partially explicit language policies under colonial rule. Nothing comparable is known from the emirates that unified into the UAE. While the British government took a keen interest in the spread of English, the maintenance of the other languages was largely in the responsibility of the local ethnic groups. After the ending of colonial rule, the newly established governments pursued their own linguistic policy agendas, with very different outcomes in Singapore, Hong Kong, and the UAE.

As an ethnically and linguistically diverse society, Singapore faces the double challenge of managing and developing this diversity, on the one hand, while funnelling it into a national identity of Singaporeans, on the other. The creation of a nation of Singaporeans is of paramount importance to the government, as the city-state is relatively young (created in 1965), small, surrounded by the relatively large countries of Indonesia and Malaysia, and harbours a mix of ethnicities, languages, and cultural values that are not autochthonous to the region. The indigenous Malays contribute 13.4% to the population (2010 Census of Population; Wong 2010), whereas the share of Chinese lies at 74.1%, that of Indians at 9.2%, and that of various other groups at 3.3% (mainly Eurasians, Europeans, Japanese, and Arabs). An important move of far-reaching consequences, especially for the Chinese community, was the assignment of ‘mother tongues’ to the major ethnic groups (Mandarin for the Chinese, Malay for the Malays, and Tamil for the Indians), in spite of significant internal differentiation within the Chinese and Indian ethnic communities. Since Mandarin was not the language spoken by the Chinese immigrant groups to Singapore, the Chinese community practically had to shift to a new mother tongue, or relearn their mother tongue, as it were. Moreover, due to the high prestige of English and its wide use across Singapore in many domains of society and increasingly also as a home language, the mother tongues are being relegated to second languages and are also treated as such in the education system, where the language of instruction has been obligatorily English since 1987. Lionel Wee (this volume) points to the enormous pragmatism behind Singapore’s bilingualism, where ‘English is to be learnt as a resource for competing in the modern world while the mother tongues serve as heritage markers’. The main function of the mother tongues, then, is to preserve the Asian identity of its speakers, and, in the case of Mandarin, also to enable business opportunities with an increasingly powerful mainland China. For a long time, the rationale fuelling language and diversity management in Singapore was a high degree of coherence of language and ethnic belonging as well as purity and homogeneity. This is the conceptual foundation on which the Speak Mandarin Campaign and the Speak Good English Movement rest, as they both target and aim to reduce diversity and heterogeneity, both regarding Chinese vernaculars and the ‘broken’ code of Singlish. Interestingly, more recently we can witness the recognition of hybrid identities (such as ‘Chinese-Malay’, ‘Malay-Chinese’) and there is evidence that the mixed or hybrid code of Colloquial Singapore English is increasingly accepted as a national solidarity code in spite of all the government activity to discredit it.

The official language of Hong Kong for almost the whole of the colonial period was English, in spite of the fact that the greater part of the population spoke Chinese, specifically Cantonese. Until 1974, when Chinese was designated a co-official language, Chinese had no official status, even though there were English-medium schools and Chinese-medium schools operating side by side. Accordingly, Hong Kong functioned as a bilingual city from its very beginnings, with – naturally – massive imbalances in the kind and degree of bilingualism across its population. Anita Poon (this volume) explains that neither the British colonial administration nor the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) defined the term ‘Chinese language’. In the context of Hong Kong, it has traditionally referred to ‘written Modern Standard Chinese and spoken Cantonese’. The British colonial government installed several language policy measures in the 1980s and 1990s that primarily aimed at improving students’ language standards and entailed the recruitment of expatriate lecturers of English as well as the revision of the curricula. These were language-in-education policies only. With the handover of sovereignty to the HKSAR in 1997, a new language policy was instituted whose objective is to promote biliteracy in written Chinese and English, and trilingualism in spoken Cantonese, Putonghua, and English. In addition, around 70% of secondary schools were required to use Chinese as the medium of instruction, superseding the formerly employed streaming policy that allowed schools to select their medium of instruction. From 1998 onwards, Putonghua has been a compulsory subject in primary schools and junior secondary schools. One observable result of these reforms is that they have contributed to the recent spread of Putonghua in the community, with the proportion of Hong Kong people claiming to speak Putonghua rising from 25.3% in 1996 to 48.6% in 2016.

The official language of the UAE is Arabic, but this had not been officially regulated for government communication until 2008 and can certainly be interpreted as a consequence of the extremely high share of foreigners in the country and the concomitant strong influence of other languages. The de facto official language, however, is English, although, strictly speaking, it only has the status of a foreign language. There is an interesting dichotomy in that all government and legal documents have to be in Arabic, while English is mainly used for written documentation in the commercial sectors of society and also in the education system. Moreover, English has developed into the undisputed spoken lingua franca for the society at large. E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 The multilingual ecologies of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai
• PART I Socio-historical perspectives
• PART II Language policies and planning
• PART III Societal multilingualism
• PART IV Multilingual language acquisition
• PART V The Englishes of postcolonial cities
• Index