Charting the language shift from ‘dialects’ to Mandarin in Singapore through local newspaper discourses, 1840s-present

While the phenomenon of language shift and maintenance has been receiving increasing scholarly attention, greater focus has traditionally been placed on the experiences of minority groups. The situation in Singapore’s Chinese community paints a more interesting picture as it involves a shift from non-Mandarin ‘dialects’ which were previously majority languages, to Mandarin which was a minority language during colonial times. This paper sets out to examine this shift from ‘dialects’ to Mandarin in Singapore by drawing on local newspapers as a resource. In particular, this study will focus on the where and why of the shift, by investigating changes in the use of ‘dialects’ and Mandarin across different domains, and the factors that could have led to such changes. The results indicate that while a shift away from ‘dialects’ is generally undisputed, the shift can be further characterised as occurring earlier and being more far-going in some domains than others. Different institutional, status, subcultural, and sociocultural factors were also identified, with some being found to resist a shift to Mandarin instead of motivating it. Together, the findings support the conclusion that the language shift in Singapore’s Chinese community deserves further qualification as being differential and multifaceted.Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and Multilingual Studie