 Good afternoon everyone. I'm going to do the introduction whilst the computer decides to update itself. My name is Anne Pauls and I welcome you all today, but especially a speaker who's coming from actually Singapore via Genoa in Italy. And before I do an introduction of his talk and of Francesco himself. The reason for this talk is, there are various reasons, but I do want to identify, originally Francesco was going to do this for the course called Issues in World Englishes. So I am scanning the room for all the students in issues of World Englishes. I'm seeing quite a few of them. For you it is compulsory to be at this talk. And I hope you can ask some questions afterwards. But also the issue for the students doing issues in World Englishes. Please follow the Moodle website in terms of arrangements for the strike weeks. So I would like you to check that regularly. Okay. Oh, I think we're nearly on board. So again, I'd like to welcome Francesco Cavallaro, who is associate professor at Nanyan Technology University. And in the department of section, I don't know what it is anymore, but it's the Department of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies. And Francesco really is an authority on issues of multilingualism. And more recently, that is the last 20 years, more recently, with a major focus on what's happening in Singapore. I think the Singaporean situation is extremely interesting, both for the English elements, the spread of English, but also about combining multilingualism and indeed in other languages and English. I'm not going to do much more than ask him to perhaps start as quickly as possible. If you can get on board, there should be. Oh, what happened to it? Oh, it's changed the input. Hang on. And just one brief thing. He works both in quantitative and qualitative methods, but I think today he'll talk a bit more about census information. A more quantitative bit of census and other stuff. Great. Thank you, Anne. Thank you. That nice introduction. Good to be here. So nice to see so many of you on a rainy, cold day, or is this normal for London? Coming from a tropical climate, I feel like I've had a constant cold for the last month. So bear with me, please. Okay, so this is me, where I come from, nice background, the Singaporean flag. I don't know how many of you, anyone here from Singapore? Okay. So you can sort of tell me what I'm saying wrong or something. You can correct all the mistakes, or I can call on you for some more input, if you like. I will allow me, if need be. So the technical issues always. It is on. That's okay. I'll just use the... This is what the brief outline of my talk. I'll be, of course, talking about Singapore. And as Anne said, I do a lot of work looking at quantitative data. And for today, I'll be looking or basing it mainly on census data. I'll show you lots of census data from Singapore, past and current one. And then also, especially with the students in mind, sharing some sort of small research projects that we've conducted to sort of look into the census data a little bit more in depth and not explain why that's needed in a little while. So we'll look at what shapes Singapore, sort of linguistic, I wouldn't call it the word landscape that's used for something else these days, but the environment, hence my title, Language Worlds. And then we look at the obvious causes. I mean, it's obvious that some groups are shifting away from using their traditional languages to mainly English, as you'll see. And then we look at some of the reasons and some more data on that. And then I'll end with a few thoughts about the future. Singapore sort of started as... Well, it was always there. It was always a Malay settlement until the British came and claimed it with the Samford Raffles back in the early 1800s. And this is the population in thousands over the years. The interesting thing that you need to look at so much is the past few decades where we've seen a really, from here onwards, let's say, rapid growth in population. Roughly 1 million population increase every 10 years. And the reason why it's in the decade is that's when the censuses are done in Singapore, they're done every 10 years with a mid-term census every five years, hence the 2015. So we're on track for another sort of 1 million increase in this decade. So in a few years, when the 2020 census will be done, we expect that population will have grown to 6 million. And that's what the government wants. They want the population to grow to at least 7 million. And it's usually for the... when the government says that it's usually for economic reasons, which we will not go in today. Let me put this away, otherwise I'll play with it. Miraculously or somehow, the Singapore government has managed to keep the ratio of the ethnic, major ethnic groups quite sort of constant throughout the decade. And I'll go into a little bit about this later on. As you can see, the majority are Chinese, ethnic Chinese, followed by Malays who are sort of the next major group. And then there's another group of Indian Singaporeans. And this is a quite...no, no, restart later. I don't want to do that now. Let's have a look at one of the earlier censuses. We picked this time because this is around the time that Singapore became independent from the British. The British were there for a long time and then post a Second World War. There was a whole reshuffling of stationships in that area with the development of Malaya becoming Malaysia. Singapore actually joining this new federation for a few years and then they agreed to separate again. So it's quite a tumultuous time around the time. But if we look at the languages spoken at home, remember the censor, as I said, is quite a blunt tool. He just asks, what language do you speak at home? So it doesn't have the nuances that we as linguists need. It should strike you that if not the English, you know, this 1.8% on the households in Singapore spoke English. So it's a very small number. Maybe the next number should surprise you because it's 0.1 of the population had Mandarin as the home language. This is quite important in the next slide. So the major language spoken in Singapore, also because of the large majority of being Chinese, was actually Hokkien. Hokkien was understood by just about everyone in Singapore, especially all the Chinese. And it was the most widely spoken language in Singapore at that time. Then we had 60% of the Indians who spoke Tamil. So even then we had non-Tamils living in Singapore. And we had quite a large number of other languages spoken at the time. Southern are still spoken now in much smaller numbers, especially the Chinese, as they call them in Singapore, they call them dialects, but we know they're not dialects. They're really Chinese languages of their own. So I like to use the term Chinese vernaculars. Why is the issue that only 0.1 of the population had Mandarin as the home language important? Because it was at that time also that Singapore decided on a four official language set up. They nominated Malay because of the Malay group, Tamil because it was the major Indian languages, and they chose Mandarin to represent the Chinese group. As I just showed you, no one had it as the home language. So there are reasons for that, but we won't go into the political reasons for that. The national language still is Malay. And it's in the Roman script because in the past Malay was also written in Arabic, using Arabic script. They also had nice things in the Constitution for those of you that are reading the second paragraph about anyone being free to speak and teach and learn whatever language they wanted. We might come back to this later. At the same time around this time still Singapore was trying to say, OK, how are we going to go forward with all our languages in Singapore? So at that time they decided on an education system which was based on the vernaculars spoken there. This is 1955, but they still haven't joined. They haven't fully detached from Britain and they haven't joined Malaya yet. But around 1963 is when they joined Malaya. So everything really happened after that. But the idea is that there were schools taught in Mandarin for the Chinese. There were schools in English for whoever wanted to go to these schools and there were schools taught in Tamil and Malay. And the idea was, and I think I've got it on the next slide, is that the vernacular schools would also teach English as a second language while the English schools, medium schools would teach all the other official languages as second languages as well. The reality of this is that the last Chinese medium school, the Chinese were the longest it stayed and it closed in 1987. By the mid-70s all the Malay medium schools and all the Tamil medium schools had closed. Not by the government, by basically the parents voting with their feet and not enrolling their children in Malay medium schools or Tamil medium schools. They prefer for them to be enrolled in English medium schools as will become apparent in a minute. The idea though is that at that time it was really, really important that you did your so-called mother tongue at school. It was counted for all your progress throughout Singaporean schooling. Things changed in the last 10-15 years about the importance that these subjects play when you want to go ahead. I'll come back to this later. So let's move ahead sort of time-wise and we jump a couple of decades and we look at the 1980 census. You can see the 1.8% from 1957 of English homes have now grown to 11.6%. We see an increase in homes claiming to have Mandarin as the home language. And of course from that we have the decrease in the households that speak the Chinese vernaculars. I'll give you some sort of table data, you can look at the other languages. But still you can see the Chinese homes still a big presence of the Chinese vernaculars in 1980. 1980 is another important year because in 1979 the Singapore government launched the Speak Mandarin campaign where they basically told all the Chinese Singaporeans don't speak these vernaculars at home anymore, don't speak to your children because they need to concentrate on learning Mandarin and it will negatively impact their learning of Mandarin. Those of you that are linguists or educators here, you have to wonder who's making these policies. Obviously they were not linguists and educators, they were all engineers and lawyers. But there are other political undertones for why Mandarin was pushed at the time. And remember in the 50s China was communist. The Singapore passports were stamped with this red stamp saying this passport is not valid for travel to China and yet they still chose Mandarin as the mother tongue of the Chinese Singaporeans. We'll come back to that if we have time. Let's jump another couple of decades in the 2000 census which is when things are getting interesting. The population that uses English predominantly at home has doubled from 11.6 to 23 and the homes that speak Mandarin at home have tripled. So everything is going fine. The government is quite happy with this. Yes there are some people switching to English rather than the other languages but they're more preoccupied with what's happening with the Chinese community and they're growing quite nicely. The Mandarin speakers that is and the so-called dialects are decreasing every day. So now there's quite few of them. Just pause here for a second. I said the census data is always a blunt tool. Those of us that may work with census data will understand this. They simply asked what language do you speak at home. It doesn't account for bilingualism, it doesn't account for trilingualism, it doesn't account for any of the sort of switching that people do in their homes or when they are multilingual. And the Chinese are quite diverse in Singapore. This is just a few. There's at least another four or five other Chinese groups. The Malays are also quite diverse. People think that all the Malays in Singapore are the same. They're not. A lot of them come from Indonesia, from different islands in Indonesia and they actually speak quite distinct languages like Javanese or Boyanese. We have a different type of Malay that was spoken and it's almost dead now. Baba Malay, which the local people are intermarried with Chinese and Malays are intermarried. The Indian community is also quite diverse as well. And the census doesn't pick this up. The census has asked for a language. We are lucky actually that they're still asking for Hokkien, Cantonese and Teochew. So we have data for that. But none of the other. Chinese vernaculars, we don't know who speaks Boyanese or Javanese from the census data. They don't pick that up. And the Indians all they ask is, do you speak Tamil or other language? And all the other languages are long together. So if we want to know more about these groups, we need to do more work. Then just look at the census. But let's keep up with the census. This is the same data that I showed you before. In the table forms it's easier to see the changes across time. This is for the whole island. In a minute I'll show you, I'll go into each ethnic group and show you the changes within each ethnic group. So this is everyone in Singapore who speaks English at home or Mandarin or Chinese vernaculars, Tamil and Malay. The two other censuses that I showed you before so we can see the growth of English, the growth of Mandarin, the decline of the Chinese vernaculars and sort of Tamil and Malay basically keeping stable. If we add to 2010 we start seeing the first for me interesting aspect. Because English is growing still but in 10 years the Mandarin speaking homes have not increased as you could have sort of predicted as a trend but that was not happening. If we add the mid-term results from 2015 we still see this increase in English but we still see a stabilizing of Mandarin. Actually I've got some nice little arrows to show that increase in English, stabilizing in Mandarin and Tamil. Of course we have a continuous decrease in Chinese vernaculars and it's a little bit slower now because really it's only the old people that speak it so what the census speaks up is that the older people are passing away rather than a natural shift. I haven't read it arrow at the end because most people didn't expect the Malay community to start shifting as quickly as it has in the last 15 years and I'll look at that in more detail in a minute. This is the same data in a sort of chart for those of you that are more visually capable or prefer this. Again the slopes of the English going up for the Chinese, the Mandarin stabilizing and the decline of the vernaculars and things like that. I'll come back to these individually as I look at each ethnic group in a minute. So what we had if we look at what we have shown you so far we can see that there's an obvious impact of the policies brought in by the government. One is the one I mentioned which I'll mention again in a minute, the Speak Mandarin campaign for the Chinese group. Singapore prides itself in having a bilingual education policy. Again I'm not criticizing especially for the Singaporeans in the audience the government or anything like that. It's a great education system. The students do really well at it. The issue I have of course is with the term bilingual education. They say they have a bilingual education policy where really in the schools there's nothing taught in any of the mother tongues. Even the term mother tongue remember it's a term that the government imposed on each ethnic group. Your mother tongue if you're Chinese is Mandarin. It doesn't matter what you speak at home if you're Malay it's Malay, if you're Indian it's Tamil although they've relaxed on the Indians. I'll get back to that in a second. So when you have an education system that is fully in English and then the other languages are taught purely as second languages you can see that there something has to give. We humans are quite sensitive to these things especially issues of status issues of prestige, issues of value, instrumental value for what we do and what we learn. So what we have to pre-end the whole presentation in a way is an obvious shift to English by all groups in Singapore. And I'll detail this in the next few slides with the title language shift. Let's have a look at the Indian community first. It's a smaller so we'll start with them. Our editorial is about 9.1% now The official mother tongue for the Indian community is Tamil but it's been about 10 years now that some known Tamil languages have been accepted by the Singapore government and more importantly the Singapore Ministry of Education so that if you're not Tamil you can actually study Hindi or Punjabi or there's a couple of other languages at schools. 10 years ago or 15 years ago all the time before then no matter if you were Indian you had to learn Tamil at school. You could apply to learn Malay or Chinese but nothing else. I already mentioned this the number that the census shows that speak Tamil in Singapore has dropped from the 60% in 1957 but it's still at 37% but it is the group that has shifted to English the most out of the three ethnic groups. Malayalam, Hindi, Punjabi and Telugu are available for students at school. Some have managed to get teachers into the school, others they need to go on a Saturday morning but that means if you're Malayalam and you want to learn Malayalam you don't have to learn Tamil as you did before. This is the same data I showed you before just for the Indian group so we have this continuing rise of English. We seem to have a stabilization of Tamil over the last 15 years. We'll see what the next census will tell us and then the other languages there's a big group of Indian Singaporeans who also speak Malay but they're decreasing and again it's the older Indian Singaporeans and then the others is all the other languages lumped together in the census. So I said we needed some more fine-grained data. This is a project that I did with one of my graduate students and we basically try to say okay we know your multilingual, if you're Punjabi what language do you speak with the people around you. In a way we look at the framework, this is more of the Fishman type if you can read the fine print is we looked at if you're at home or in a public where people can hear you and then different interlocutors who do you speak what with whom and this is in a scale of 1 to 7 we just looked at the choice of English versus Punjabi. The participants that we had were only Punjabi and that was the only languages they had in common some of them knew a little bit of Hindi and whatever but not enough to conversing. What is obvious from here is if we look at 7 means only Punjabi, 1 means only English as the age of the group that we looked at goes down and as the age of the people that they speak to decreases the Punjabi decreases and the English increases. So they're definitely more stooled bilingual although we're seeing the younger ones it's always this age group that seems to speak less of the traditional language. We think it's because the younger group are still at school so they're still learning and using this language more than the next group who has just left school but some of them with the younger people speak very little Punjabi even though they're bilingual. We know they can speak it because when they speak to their grandparents or their parents you can see at the left side of the chart the numbers are quite high. If we go outside of the home, again it's the older group that still speaks a lot of Punjabi with their close relatives but even they speak a lot of English when they speak into younger people. So what's happening here is it's an obvious thing that yes they're bilingual but they prefer language with the younger interlocutors is English rather than their traditional language and we'll come back to this. We'll come back to this. Anyway, if we look at English alone looking at the latest result we can start seeing some very high numbers of the younger Indian Singaporeans who claim to have English as a dominant language at home. So it's quite obvious that the younger people are the ones who are leading this change to English. I'll put it in a chart for you so it's a little bit easier. This is 2005 it's quite high. You'll see it when I show you the Chinese and Malays that this is sort of higher. The younger people speak quite a bit of English. You have this dip and then you have a little bit of a hump again which we assume these are the parents of the younger people. It even correlates the fact that it's the home language. That's what they speak into each other. They speak English and then it peters off as the, but even the older people speak quite a lot of English. If we look at the 2010 we see this line get higher especially for the younger people and if we look at the 2015 it gets higher again. We have some interesting things happening. There's a really low dip there. We think that that also it could be recent immigration to Singapore. We'll see whether we have time to talk about this later. How am I doing so far? I don't mind if you guys have a quick question rather you clarify it now especially since I'm showing lots of data and graphs rather than sort of wait an hour and then try and remember what we were talking about 45 minutes ago. Let's keep going. Let's have a look at the Chinese community in much the same way. I mentioned the Speak Mandarin campaign in 1979 and it was basically asking all the Singaporean Chinese to replace the so-called dialects with Mandarin. In effect if I can summarize it very succinctly is here is the government telling the Chinese community forget about what your mother tongue is okay now from now on your mother tongue will be Mandarin. If you were in that position what would your reaction be? Would you say yes of course I'll stop speaking my native language and I'll start speaking Mandarin at home or so we've I think they've had mixed results. I showed you already this is what's happening. Everyone will need especially in the service industry will need to speak Mandarin all taxi drivers whatever will need to have an oral Mandarin test etc etc so they really went all out and they cut it out almost totally from the media. The idea was to promote Mandarin as the pen Chinese language in Singapore. It was quite successful. You saw the census data I showed you before I'll show it to you again in a minute that the so-called dialects definitely decreased they're almost all gone now it's only the older Singaporean Chinese who speak it very few young people they know a little bit that's mattering but very few have unreal competence in the language and there was that increase in household that were using Mandarin. So definitely English and Mandarin have taken over from the vernaculars that's quite obvious. The question is did the Chinese all go all for accepting what the new directive from the government that now Mandarin will be a home language. What we see is that not all of them did. A lot of them went and bypass Mandarin and went straight to using English as a home language instead and left Mandarin to be taught by the school. And now really there's very few domains where you need either a vernacular or even Mandarin to survive. I don't speak Mandarin I've been living in Singapore and because I don't need Mandarin in Singapore I've been living there for 18 years and I really don't need Mandarin but we can talk about that as well later. Looking at the Chinese chart it's the same numbers I showed you before it's the steady increase of English being spoken at home that's stabilizing of the increase of Mandarin at home and then decrease in the Chinese vernaculars. So as the Chinese vernaculars decrease what we're now seeing is not a constant increase in Mandarin but the constant increase is in English. A quick look at the data that we do have for the so-called dilates. I had a student of mine who did this chart for me but then she only sent me the photo or the image of it so I couldn't change the word dilates. She put dilates and she's Singaporean. They're so ingrained into them that they dialects. Sorry? Oh yeah, Mandarin that's right. So now when you talk about Chinese that's right Itesh. When you talk about Chinese it's Mandarin. When before I'm sure 40 years ago if you say Chinese people would say which one? Not anymore. So this is quite a nice chart because it shows you who's speaking these vernaculars. The ones in blue and as you can see it's the ones who are older and while English and Mandarin are sort of spoken roughly by the same age except that you see that the red bars are higher for the younger people and I'll give you more data of that in a minute. If we look at only the vernaculars just as a matter of interest the blue bars are Hokkien which is the most widely spoken. It's the biggest group within the Chinese community and it's the one that's spoken the most. Teochew is the somewhat related to Hokkien. It's the closest one. All the others like a Cantonese speaker and a Hokkien speaker if they spoke the two languages they would not be able to understand each other. So I say they're not dialects. The only ones who could sort of roughly understand each other are the Hokkien and Teochew. They're literally sort of they come from the same branch so they're somewhat related. The interesting thing that we found here and I need to test this in real life is the yellow bars for the younger people. This is the Cantonese groups where we seem to see quite a large number of Chinese Singaporeans, young Chinese Singaporeans claiming to speak Cantonese at home. These numbers don't compare in any way with the English spoken because this is only within that very small 12% group that speaks of an Echelor at home. So the numbers are still very small but comparatively when you compare the three major groups it's interesting to see Cantonese seemingly having some sort of revival with the young people. Some of the people attribute this maybe to the power of Hong Kong media. Whether it's Cantonese artists or Cantonese movies which are very popular. Another small group, this one the Chinese are a bit of a challenge to try and survey because they are at least trilingual. So to use to try and get them to understand what language they're speaking with each other can be a bit of a challenge. This is another, it's a smaller group Hainanese again to see who speaks it. And it's a smaller group and you can see that even in the house the three youngest sort of age groups almost none of them speak it. There's very little Hainanese spoken. And interestingly even the older people who claim to have a good knowledge of Hainanese because we can see that they have really high numbers when they speak with their parents so they're quite fluent or they claim to be quite fluent in Hainanese. When they're asked what language do you speak with a younger relative, it's English. So English has becoming the language for this particular group. With the hackers we tried, that's why you have three graphs, they said okay how much who do you speak hacker with, who do you speak Mandarin with and who do you speak English with and you can see that the younger group speak no hacker at all and they show the highest level of English and all the groups are sort of mixed in Mandarin. So again it's a bilingual, at least a bilingual group still to hackers. They do speak, even the younger people speak some Mandarin as you can see but very little hacker. So from being a trilingual community all these especially the smaller Chinese ethnic groups are becoming bilingual in English and Mandarin with English being the more language. And we've done other tests we've gone around asking sort of random Singaporeans questions like this. This is quite a sizable group. Do you speak more Mandarin English at home? Yes, no. So they're quite equal as you can see. So they're definitely still bilingual. I'm not saying that even those that claim to speak English at home only speak English. Although amazingly enough we are getting more and more Singaporeans who don't speak anything but English. They're still not that large but they're becoming more popular or more common. Do you speak Mandarin more Mandarin than English in public? Definitely not. The language for the public language for the Chinese at least the ones that we surveyed seems to be English. Speaking of English then let's have a look at who speaks English within the Chinese community. The 2015 numbers you can see the ones in brackets are quite high for the younger people. So there's definitely a shift to English that the census and even some of the data from smaller research projects that we've had show. You put it in a chart 2005, 2010 and you can see the line just getting higher and higher and higher. Those of you that may be better at statistics than me you can try and project the trend to the next 50 years and I'm sure you're going to see this line being extremely high, especially with the young people. I don't know what I was trying to show you here. The difference with English and Mandarin in 2010 blue line is English, red line is Mandarin so in 2010 only five years ago it was still relatively high. What I wanted to show you is the contrast, the new purple line dropping in only five years with these age groups. Go from the red line to the purple line. What we're seeing is a steady increase in English but a definite collapse among younger people, those that have Mandarin as the home language. This is just again to show you who speaks the vernaculars and it's all the older people, that's why it rises sharply to the right. Malay, quick look at data safest in terms of numbers because the numbers we're looking at who speaks English among the Malay community are relatively small compared to the other two groups. But what we need to see is that in only 15 years the households or the Singaporeans that claim to have English as the dominant language among the Malay is risen from 7.9% to a quite significant 21.5 in only 15 years. So that trend for them is also that they're shifting away. Yes, you can see the Malay on bars are really, really high but the important thing for us is that they're sloping downwards again smaller every year. So when will they reach the numbers of the Chinese and the Indians. Another research project that we did with the Malays again to see who they speak to, what is the dynamics within the family. This is the older group, the 45 and above, but you can see that towards the right when they're speaking to younger relatives, even the older Malays claim to use quite a bit of English. This is again seven means only Malay, one would be only English. Still quite high, but definitely a lot of English being used. If we go down in age, the next age group we surveyed, the bar is getting lower, especially onto the right, and especially with the women. Then the 18 to 24, even lower, almost across the board, the only ones that get mostly Malay are the grandparents. So it shows that they can speak Malay. If they claim to use Malay with the grandparents, that means they can speak Malay, but the choice, the language of choice with even their parents or younger, sort of their own age group is more and more English. It's half enough because we're looking at 1 to 7 in the middle. The younger people, they're still at school but it's interesting to see that for some reason the women, the young Malay women seem to be using more English than the males. Again, like all the others, the interlocutor seems to matter as the most important trigger for English. The younger the people they are, the younger they are, the younger the people that they speak to, more English. Only the older people still use a significant amount of Malay, but we can see that it's changing. If we look at, especially for the Malay, it's more important for the Malay because one of the reasons why people have said the Malay community has been keeping their language much better than the Indians and the Chinese is because they are Muslim and all their religious ceremonies are done in Malay. It used to be the case, they went to the mosque on a Friday, the sermon almost always was in Malay. There are still lots of mosques that do Malay sermons, but a lot of them now instead have shifted to English because the Muslim community in Singapore wants to be more inclusive. They don't just want to be mosques for the Malays. They want to be a mosque for every Muslim in Singapore. They've shifted to more and more sermons and we can see that red line is when asked what sort of language do you use, it's still quite high across the board with the religious places and people, but we can start seeing an impact in the language used in the sermons, which is now dropped to almost two, around two out of five. But there's still the flux when it comes to the domain of religious studies or religion for the Malays because when asked do you agree to this statement? Do I feel more comfortable using Malay? It's sort of free, not very high, but it's still quite high. But then they say I find it acceptable to use English in my prayers when making a prayer, it's easier to express certain things in English. So they're agreeing to these statements. They're saying Madrasa lessons should only be conducted in Malay. They disagree. So there seems to be still some flux about what language is most commonly used for the Malays in the religious context. But is it still a domain where the Malay is being kept alive? I think my argument would be that not so much anymore. And maybe that's why things have accelerated so much in the last 15 years for the Malays. If we look at again as we did before, just to give you some consistency at the younger age groups, who's speaking English not as high as the Indians and the Chinese, but the important thing is not so much the number, again to look at differences across the 15 years, 2005, 2010, 2015. So the trend is definitely an upward one for English becoming the home language for the Malays as well, especially with the younger ones. And we still see this dip. We see already, we're among the three groups where the younger people to the left, they speak English and then you have that hump in the middle where we think it's the parents speaking English to those children in that group. Okay, quickly go through is there some correlation between education, socioeconomic status, we've looked at the census data, we've done our own surveys and definitely what we have is that households who with higher degree of graduates, university graduates, they're all from speaking, mostly from English speaking homes. The more wealthy Singaporeans, higher income earners, or people who live in really expensive houses, the majority of them are English speakers at home. So there's definitely a correlation between English at home and education level and socioeconomic status. I'll just breeze through these. The Malays are still in flux, they seem to be more university graduates who come from Malay homes, but that's got nothing to do with the language itself is really because they're still very underrepresented in the tertiary sector. These are the figures, many have graduated from university from each ethnic group and you can see the Malays have got very few still that have graduated. They're getting a little bit better every year, but still, hence the 56.68% of the university educated that come from Malay speaking home. It's really to do with that and not so much a matter of the language itself. Okay, I cut out a lot of slides here. I didn't want to bore you with too much of the theory. We can talk about this in question time if we have, but language, mental and language research, when we look at these things and as I've shown you I sort of wanted to view some of the data before we talked about these things is that we look at a number of things like personal characteristics social factors. We've seen age, we've seen gender, we've talked about socioeconomic status, education. There's a context of domains, which is obviously still quite relevant in some communities, but doesn't seem to be so much in Singapore anymore. Language, a core value of how important is a language the only ones who seem to still hold that their language is still very valuable to them as a community are the Malays. You'll see that the other two communities really are not that attached to either Mandarin. It goes back to what I was telling you before. It's not really the Chinese's real mother tongue. It was given to them and posed on them if you want by the government saying this is now your new mother tongue. So many of them did not accept it as their mother tongue. The Tamils, the Indians have always been more ambitious, so I think they saw the value of English a lot earlier than the other groups. We could look at it, no one actually is done an ethnolinguistic vitality. Next time you come to Singapore, bring your questionnaire along. Sorry? Oh good. That's another framework that we could use to look at vitality of these languages through this approach. It's been sort of fine-tuned a number of times, but it's still a very valid framework. If we go back to the domains I said really looking have looked at all of these domains and I've given you some of the data for this. What we have is really that all the so-called important domains have all been taken over by English. The education system is English to work domain everyone unless you work directly with a Chinese company or something. There are some companies, but they will want a bilingual person. They will not want someone who only speaks Mandarin for example. All the other places really they're all dominated by English. The last domains that we see then for these, call them minority languages, call them traditional languages or heritage languages is the family or home domain and in some respects still with the Malay religious domain. Not so much in the other. We don't see young people wanting to learn Chinese so they can go to the temple or something. They don't need Chinese to do that. If you want to talk to a priest, but most of the priests nowadays speak English as well. We looked at the family or home domain. We've got a new research project that actually Anne is involved with. We're hoping to get some funding this year from the Singapore government looking at family language policy. This is something that my postdoc just emailed me this morning. He's got some preliminary data from two families. One is a high socioeconomic status family, someone who earns quite a bit of money and they only speak English at home. But there's two things in this comment that we are important in the Singaporean context. One is the fact that they see English as the gateway to securing a better job and better, more money, etc. The other one is that they're really not aware of the value of bringing up their children bilingually and to how to bring them up bilingually. Because the government is, again, I don't want to bash them too much but the advice they give is, speak Malay to your children. Speak Mandarin to your children. They don't go into the real sort of strategies that we as linguists know that really could work in certain contexts. For example, the one parent, one language or having constant frequent immersion trips Malaysia is only across the border. But no one they don't want to go to Malaysia to learn Malay. So there's some issues there as far as getting these communities awareness into these communities of how to bring them up bilingually and the benefits of it. What we get more and more is that the families from lower socioeconomic status, they're the ones who still speak the traditional language at home. And if we look at some of the, you know, for the Chinese vernaculars, some of the, there were still some blue dots or bars even for younger age groups, they tend to be families from lower socioeconomic status families as well. So that's the interesting project if we get the funding for it. Of course one other thing that we need to look at is attitudes. What do the people think about the language? What does the majority in a way the government think about the languages? Is the environment in place to for these languages to thrive? Apart from the Chinese vernaculars the government is actually quite keen to keep all the languages alive but keen is a very subjective word. I'm a bit more cynical and I still think that the government doesn't really mind if 95% of the population all became monolingual in English as long as it's like 5% to fuel the companies that need those bilingual expertise, they don't mind if everyone else shifted to English. Things would be a lot simpler. You know they spend millions of dollars every year on this so-called bilingual education that they have. They do. But let's have a quick look at some of the attitudes and you can see the pragmatism in sort of the Singaporeans since it comes through. When asked, this is Theo Chu, do you like Theo Chu? Is it nice language? Do you think it helps you build relationships? Very high scores out of 5. Do you want to keep it alive? Very high scores across all the questions that you can ask. How useful is it? Very low. And this again is something that a lot of people seem to miss. It can be a very positive attitude towards a language but then unless the community itself finds some ways of motivating themselves purely sort of beyond the fact that it's a nice language and it's something that my from the ethnic group that I belong to then it's not very successful in maintaining it. So the attitudes can be like that. The Tamels are even a more interesting group. They don't care they say if they lose Tamil as a language. Their Tamil identity is not tied to the Tamil language. As we did Honours Student of Mind did a project purely trying to look at the Singaporean Tamil identity and that's what she found. They express their identity in other ways. Celebrations, food, movies, whatever. But they don't, this is young Tamil Singaporeans, they don't mind if they children don't speak Tamil anymore. As long as other things are still there in the community. One last study I'm doing for time. Nearly there. I'm taking you through, I don't know, a whirlwind tour of Singaporean languages. I hope I'm not speaking too fast from you but I'm conscious of the time. In 2008 these two people from the National Institute of Education did a small study and they asked Singaporeans to rate these four items which they said are central to being Singaporeans or the Singaporean food. Singlish which is the colloquial variety of English spoken in Singapore. Quite distinctly Singaporean and really if there's one language that unites all Singaporeans I think the Singaporeans will agree with me it's singlish. Then the fact that Singapore is clean and then casuism. To me it's a negative thing but some people think it's a great thing. It's the Singaporean idea that you have to get the best out of everything and everyone. Get the best deal possible. It's called being casu. Am I explaining it properly? Something like that. Anyway the thing is for them is really that we're interested to see where Singlish came in this and of course he came out of top but this is a really very limited study. We took on this idea. We expanded. We had a quite a large group of Chinese Malay Indians and what we did was we got a group of Singaporeans to come up with 10 actually asked them to come up with 5 or 6 things that they thought they were really proud about Singapore. So they come up with the fact that Singapore is multicultural. They're actually proud of their ethnicity meaning that a lot of the identities tied. I am Chinese Singaporean I am Indian Singaporean or MLA Singaporean. Local food. We threw in the language ones even if they hadn't given them to us. So we put in Singlish. We put in a more standard variety of English because Singaporeans speak some very good English. I can understand most of the Singlish even after 18 years living there especially if they speak a really local variety but they're standard English if I can use that word is very very good. Then the mother tongue so Malay Mandarin and Tamil for those that especially for the Chinese we threw in the word dialect in there. Just to cut a short story short a long story short these are the results. It was a ranking exercise so one out of nine and we were obviously interested to see where those three or four languages would come into the whole ranking and Singlish overall came slightly ahead of standard English and the mother tongue was quite sort of far behind. If we throw in the dialect for the Chinese it's the last so no one really ranked it or they ranked it last out of everything. If you look at only the Chinese we can have a chat about the top two bars in a minute but look at the blue bars for now Singlish and standard Singaporean English are very closely tied together and the mother tongue and dialect are actually quite close. If we look at the Indians Singlish is even is sort of much higher than standard Singaporean English but surprisingly they they gave Tamil a higher a quite a high rating. If we look at the Malays of course unexpectedly they're the ones who value their mother tongue the most out of the three groups to make it easier to compare I've put them on line graphs so this is the Chinese the Malays what we see is that they're lower for ranking for standard English and Singlish but higher for mother tongue and the Indians sort of somewhere in the middle so just to highlight the mother tongue standard mother tongue Malays are highest standard Singaporean English Chinese are a little bit ahead of the Indians and the Malays at the lowest at Singlish we have the Indians who seem to value it more the Chinese next and the Malays later. Some people can say that maybe for the Malays because the way Singlish works is it borrowed a lot from local languages and it's borrowed a lot from Chinese languages as well so some people say that in Malays the Singlish that they speak doesn't have so many Chinese borrowings so they're not as keen on it as the Chinese are. For us just interestingly that came out of this is the group that values their ethnicity the less or the least are the Chinese and again when you ask Chinese this is quite true they're distanced and you say are you Chinese they say no I'm Singaporean especially when they're outside of Singapore. It's also a backlash with the current immigration policies by the government we'll see what I have time to talk about that as well. Who's the group instead of values being in a multicultural society the most it's the Malays and Chinese value their Singaporean roots again as a reaction to so many Chinese from mainland China that have been allowed to settle in Singapore okay summing up what do we have for the next generation remember this woman did you meet this woman no we didn't take you to Bollywood Ivy Ivy Bollywood yes it's amazing but this is just Ivy Bollywood problem but this is quite common of this age group where they will speak English because Singaporean she's half in Hindi and half Chinese so she speaks Hindi she speaks Malay again it's quite common people in that age group Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew and actually a weakest language claims it's Mandarin so it's really quite common that people of this generation or older will be quite multilingual if we jump down a few decades in age this is my graduate studies office manager Ivy she speaks some Hokkien and some Teochew because of her parents but her strongest traditional language is Mandarin and again she claims that because of her schooling not because they speak it at home but English is really her major language if we look at our new students that come in every year this is a made up person we actually never had that I don't know why Ivy must have gone out of fashion as a name in Singapore I haven't had an Ivy student was looking for one but I couldn't find one English obviously Mandarin because fresh out of school they do teach these mother tongues of very high level in the schools I have to give them that but she claims that her I have one student who claims a number of students who claim that Japanese or Korean is better than their Mandarin in first year university this is an interesting episode that happened in my university last year where all the stall owners in the canteens will receive the letter from the NTU management and the NTU management saying you will change all your Chinese signs to English all of them I mean it's always like categorical of course they keep up a fast and then you say sorry sorry sorry it was a mistake the reason why I put it here is because ten years ago no one would have sent that letter out to anyone saying you have to change someone in the office would have questioned this letter and saying are you sure this is right you can't do this and yet last year this letter went out sort of multiple copies to multiple people without anyone questioning it until the stall owners came back and said what the hell are you doing we can't do this so then they changed the policy instead as long as it's bilingual your menu you can have any language you like on your menu but I'm saying that's why things are changing in Singapore and I saw this as one of a symptom of that going back to what Lee Kuan Yew said really I don't know of any other country where language matters are dealt at such a high level. Lee Kuan Yew was the founder of Singapore he's been until he died he was still in the ministry but every year whether it was him or it was another Prime Minister on the national speech that they would give there would be something about language in that national I mean can you imagine your Prime Minister telling you don't speak your dialect speak only as she has it happened but this is every year anyway and still there are issues with that but Singapore has had success over the last 50 years it's undoubtable especially if we look at the other countries around Singapore really Singapore is a little diamond that everything where everything works compared to the dysfunctional neighbors that it has and one of the reasons why it's had such success is because of the high level of English that the Singaporeans hold that's why they can be a financial hub in Asia that's why they can be a trading hub in Asia when other countries around them struggle if we project in the future nearly done guys of course the so called dialects are disappearing as they people die off there will soon won't be anyone really speaking those languages at home anymore the promotion of Mandarin will continue and I'll give you another quote from Likoy Nyu in a minute to explain this how much Mandarin will still be spoken as a home language we're not sure the trend seems to be that they're stable but that number I don't know if you sort of realize the numbers it seems artificial because if you're having vernaculars dropping, English increasing it's impossible that the numbers should add up that the Mandarin speakers should remain stable they should be dropping but they're not they're not dropping because of what the Singapore policy has I know it's a lot of text I tell my students don't put so much text break it up I've tried to get you to read the more prominent ones in red and blue but this is the government policy they know they have Chinese population that speaks Chinese or some Chinese but they're not so worried about the standards of Singaporeans they know that our homegrown core will be reinforced by a continuing flow of the completely Chinese educated from China Taiwan and Hong Kong who will come to work here okay work permit or employment pass or more importantly as PRs and citizens and it's these new migrants that are keeping that Mandarin percentage at 35 otherwise if it was just the Singaporeans that we were counting it would have dropped it continues also we're going to get lots of Chinese tourists which is true so that means we need Chinese people working in the service industry and I did say that now I've had no problem living in Singapore without Chinese except for the last few years where I've gone to some schools even at university and I've asked for something and the person doesn't speak English because they have fresh migrants from China they speak only Mandarin it's going to take them a while to learn English of course they will but that's the first time now I've had quite a number of encounters with people in the service industry who speak Mandarin and don't speak English but like when you just I was digressing this is Singapore can maintain a high standard of spoken Mandarin because we have a sizable majority of Mandarin speaking Singaporeans it's not true it's not sizable anymore it's dropping every day but more importantly there's a significant number of Mandarin speakers people from China Taiwan and Hong Kong they will keep Mandarin alive and simple that's his words I just highlighted them so what will happen of course the whether we're intended or unintended we have this increase in English speakers at home people who have English as the dominant language at home and a lot of these kids are having problems now joining the school system because I said the school system in Singapore does teach Mandarin or Malay or Tamil to a very high level okay when they two years into the program if they started from zero they will be fluent in whatever language they're starting this is in primary school so they really really drive the students hard unlike where I come from in Australia five years of primary school in Italian and they're lucky if you can count to 20 and know a few songs or something no that's not the case in Singapore Singaporeans in the audience can appreciate that so dominance of English, English will definitely not go away though the government has tried to hammer it away it's not going away and a definite shift away from the traditional languages as the closing last two slides I want to bring you back to 1819 which was probably the earliest grand proposal I've seen that I've read by Sir Stamford Raffles the sort of the founder of Singapore he wrote a 25 page proposal to the East India Trading Company to start the title is a Malay college in Singapore but what he wanted to do was if you can read all the way at the back he wanted to teach Malay boogies and Siamese he wanted to teach Chinese, Javan, Berman and Pali he wanted to teach Arabic and of course he wanted to teach English and more enlightened subjects like international knowledge and history to the elite the children of the elite in Singapore his dream didn't quite happen his school started then had to close down but now there is one of the best schools in Singapore called Raffles Institution so his legacy is there but more interestingly I think we should try ending our own grand proposals with a statement like this. I'll give you a minute to read it what it means by these monuments of a virtue is what I've shown you in the previous slide the languages, the general knowledge and English so while the triumphs and whatever will not endure things will happen to England England could disappear but what she brought to this sort of fire outpost that needed educating will persevere interesting symbolism of where Singapore is now and with that I thank you for your attention Thank you very much Francesco for a phenomenal rapid but I think still something that we can follow I hope so I mean that's absolutely incredible but let me open it for any questions or comments or any contributions I'll just kick things off I didn't know about that was it next week? No it's tonight Chelsea, Barcelona yes I don't know why the guy mentioned the sun on Britain there ain't no sun there you know the sun shines on Britain 24 hours a day what's the saying? anyway, your question I think there are two related questions I think one of the questions I had was these days we talk a lot about the rise of nationalism around the world, Trumpism, Brexitism, you name it I wonder how this rise of these nationalism affects or will affect the types of patterns of language use that are reported and perhaps associated with that question is how does the economic rise of China and India and other the other way around in this case China and India certainly affect the use of language or at least the use of those languages that you talk about Manly and South Indian languages Interesting questions Nationalism, I don't think it says a parent in Singapore I'm not saying that Singaporeans are not proud or nationalistic there are and the poor male Singaporeans have to go through two years of compulsory national service and two weeks every year or something until 35 so they are obviously very proud of being Singaporeans but it hasn't transformed into the sort of nationalistic movements I have to say because then you need to look at why is it in other places you have the rise of sort of the more nationalistic right wing parties there's not space for that in Singapore whatever you say about Singapore it's a very controlled country Is it the most important party in Singapore? No, I mean they have a workers party that wins a few seats every year but I think last election it was 90% or something like that Do you remember the Singaporean that votes? It was anyway, it was the PAP which has been in power since independence won a landslide again so there's no rise for that for nationalism Having said that we have seen some flare ups because of the influx of a certain type of migrants that the government is letting in especially the Chinese from mainland China so some Singaporeans there's been some very vocal cries about the number and the type of migrants that they're letting Is that a in a way a show of nationalism it probably is to that extent What was the second question? Why is it China? It's important because Singapore has a hell of a lot of money invested in China not so much in India although the Prime Minister of India came I think it was last year in 2017 finally came with the delegation to Singapore to try and sign some more deals so definitely China is a huge trading partner and investment partner so but what is happening more and more is the government having Singapore government hasn't realized or hadn't realized 10-15 years ago is that the Chinese are learning English better than the Singaporeans are learning Mandarin even though they're growing up with Mandarin and going to school and learning Mandarin at such high levels so more and more the relationship with China is not governed or managed through these bilingual Singaporeans but a lot of them are bilingual Chinese from China and English so the importance of the rise in China hasn't been felt as much but there's still that issue that we were talking about it earlier, remember the greater China sort of thing it hasn't affected the majority of Chinese Singaporeans they don't, in a way, feel sorry I think that they still have to use the term Chinese but they whenever possible they make it an issue to say no why not Chinese I am Singaporean it's got to be double barreled it's got to be here, Chinese-Singaporean both of them have the last 10-15 years in particular in China and India of international schools propagating this thirst for English in education so my question is has that happened in Singapore and do Singaporean nationals have the right to attend these schools? Yes, lots and lots and more opening up these international schools but Singaporeans are not allowed to attend these schools unless they have a very good reason like one of my, I know that someone, a child lived overseas for the last 10 years so therefore they couldn't acquire the mother tongue to the level that they needed to attend local school they were allowed to attend but you need special permission from the Ministry of Education And then just for our question I don't know if you're familiar with the languages used within those schools can you take the international schools will give a range of languages and then it's up to the student to choose so let's say Mandarin is not compulsory in these schools, no, you can choose Yes I was interested in that slide that was entitled Pragmatism You want me to go back to Singaporeans if I have to use them one of the words I was curious that for me doesn't sound like pragmatism at all, it just seems like you're being forced to do something you're weird and I was, based on that what can you envision and the status of different languages at the moment, what can you envision the government forcing people to do imagine 1957 based on not being about to de-hockey in China before what can you envision more forcing more than the policies on to that's an interesting it's a very interesting question, first of all let me explain the pragmatism and you're quite right this is like when you and this was forcing something on Singaporeans but why I put it under the slide at the title of pragmatism is because Singaporeans are very pragmatic in nature of course they can't rebel it's not a sort of country where you can say to the government no, I'm not going to do it strike, for example who's going to strike, it's illegal in Singapore so there's no such action available so Singaporeans are very pragmatic and say, well, where am I going to get out of this and they could see not necessarily like the government wanted to take on Mandarin as their language but they could see it that okay, I'm just going to enroll my kids in English so they're being very pragmatic about a lot of the edX from the government in the future what else they might enforce in Singapore I don't think there's anything else that they can really enforce that I can see because the language situation is panning out as it is the government is letting it sure they're putting money and they're putting a lot of they're doing a lot of lip service to promote the speak Mandarin campaign has changed to a speak good Mandarin campaign really, it's not enforcing the message is not stop speaking dialects because they know the dialects are all gone, the vernaculars are all gone but in 2000 they launched the speak good English movement but they called it a movement they made it quite sort of clear that we're not telling you that you have to do this I mean once the government starts promoting something Singaporeans being the pragmatic people that they are they will follow it I'm talking about language wise I'm not talking about other factors or other aspects of society that the government may intrude on because there are lots of other things that they're still imposing on from the criminal side of things and other policies but that's not for me to comment I think I can't see what else they can do with language because they're letting things go and eventually the vernacular speakers are all going to die out I don't think they really mind if that 35% of Mandarin speakers drops to 10-15% because there's all these migrants from other Chinese speaking parts of the world that are going to fuel the need for Mandarin speakers I'm not sure I don't know if I can answer that question I think we've had a few talks about about Kristian here and also somebody talking about speak hockey movements in Anang as well I was also wondering perhaps it was the government definitely is not doing it the government will still not promote any of these there have been a couple of interventions by the government in some articles written in the New York Times about everyone expected that when Lee Kuan Yew died actually that things would quieten down on this front that maybe Singapore government would there's really absolutely no reason why these Chinese vernaculars should still be banned from public television for example they allow cable TV we can listen to programs in Hokkien or Cantonese from Hong Kong or Taiwan but not on national television everything is still dubbed in Mandarin or national television they did produce a small TV series totally in Hokkien which we thought the government is really relaxing first of all the Hokkien they used is one that no one uses in the street it's like depicting a market scene here in London and everyone speaks RP English or something that's the way so it was really artificial not many Singaporeans really took it to heart but even then some guy wrote in the New York Times there were two articles one about languages the Chinese vernaculars that Singapore is relaxing and then another one about maybe they're relaxing their stance on singlish and the government respond and says that's not true so you see signs that they are and then officially though and on we're not why? I don't understand it's only the old people who speak the vernaculars why? let them live the last few years listening to Hokkien on national television singlish has been actually used in national television films right national films you have worse in times there was always the sorry to interrupt but the laws were always that it could not be national television but films had a special dispensation as long as it wasn't above a certain percentage of the total narrative but no one went there and actually measured it so there were lots of really really interesting movies with singlish I think and it uses a lot of like singlish but that's what I'm saying remember there was what's his name I always get his name with the southern mixed up Cho Chu Kang he is a comedian who used to speak singlish on television but then they stopped his serious and they made him publicly go to English schools and then to English school to learn English and then finally few years later he said now they're introducing singlish again singlish is part of the national day parade there are floats in the national day parade every year with all these singlish sort of words and slogans on it but this is only last year that this person wrote of Singapore is becoming more relaxed about singlish and then the government responded and said no we're not it's the ownership of singlish right now it's a reference to the speak good English campaign which actually seems like it filled this review because it's another policy that wasn't in place it's still unable to eradicate singlish I think the premise was to make Singaporeans more fluent in English and stuff like that and just going back to your question there are private groups starting little speak Hokkien type movements what do they call it the father tongue there's a father tongue movement as opposed to mother tongue where young people are trying to revitalize a language like Hokkien which doesn't have government funding but the government has allowed them I think 20 years ago if they tried something like this the government would have snapped them on the wrist and said don't do this when now instead they're just letting them be as long as it's online and it's not affecting anyone in a major way I'm thinking of offering Hokkien at NTU the person at the back was first thank you you feel the government actually be quite happy if most people speak English because there has been a drive recently for education they didn't administer it they want to improve your mother tongue they want people to speak both languages and so I was wondering why you say that because the results are not there with the resources that the government has I think I mentioned that they do invest a lot of money on all the especially the official mother tongues and Malay, the Indian languages and Chinese but the numbers speak for themselves Singapore has been able to intervene in social issues in such a significant way but they're not having any effect on the Singaporeans learning these mother tongues the Malay is a switching it sounds important that way because it's very outcome driven and because the outcomes are not there it's not really the case but I think my question then is how would you advise a policymaker in the education registry for example or in the social what would they do they have been told they have been told by other experts not just the likes of me that one of the things they need to do is turn their education system into a real bilingual program when you have 12 years of English media education no matter what else you do people who graduate from 12 years of English media education where they have so-called mother tongue is just reduced to a second language just as a subject at school all the research shows you if it's a subject at school the language will not survive in any community if it's just purely that so one way would be to do that turn it into a real bilingual program but Singapore Ministry of Education let's say starting to teach history in the mother tongue it may cost more I don't know I would take up the mother tongue lessons and invest some of that money in training history teachers and geography teachers in Malay and Tamil you need to get young Singaporeans to see that it's not just the school subject whether it's Malay or Tamil that's one thing that I would try and do but as soon as you mention this you can see their eyes glaze over absolutely not, we can't endanger our children's education of course I'm not practicing Singapore but that's why I said they still call it bilingual education, it's a misnomer it's not in all fairness I keep saying this they do teach these mother tongues to a very very high level but even then they've been relaxing I would know, you don't need a mother tongue to go to university anymore it used to be the case, you needed a mother tongue you don't need it anymore there's so many other ways that it's been devalued so to speak in the education system because you've talked about that as influencing English or I imagine and a lot of us go to school when we have a good education in terms of the mother tongue and do well in the exams it's not seen as a high status language but would it be possible then to address the issue from a cultural and educational level do you think that might work as a it might work for the malaise again because they still have the numbers and they still have the attitude that their language is still fundamental to their identity I don't think that's the case with Chinese Singaporeans for example to try and order the sudden even with a massive effort to try and change your attitudes towards Mandarin and say you need to value it I don't think it's going to work especially when you're still going through a system that praises high proficiency in English all the rewards are in English you go to university there's no more mother tongue at university it's all English sorry, she was first can I just pose manipulars are dying out because the older generation is passing away because I watched an interesting video on how some medical students are learning Hokkien, Tiuqiu and Cantonese in order to reach out to the older generation because the older generation they don't speak English they don't speak Mandarin they only speak the Chinese manipulars there's a large number of them as a result they refuse to receive medical care because they feel like the medical staff will not understand them so as a result some medical students are learning those Chinese manipulars in order to reach out to these group of people so I think it's only humanistic to learn some of the Chinese manipulars just letting it go letting it die out they're doing it for a practical reason to speak to these older people who don't speak any other language but once they die out there will be no more medical students even learning this language there will be no need for them anymore so I don't know whether it's an alternative view I still think as all the people die out no one will learn will need to learn Hokkien anymore even the medical students won't need to learn that's also a representation of the culture if it dies out there is that but the culture for Chinese a lot of it is tied to the ethnic group you know, I'm Hokkien that's my culture rather than I am Chinese and Mandarin is my vehicle to express that culture I know we're running out of time and stood up one last question maybe in the corner just a comment I wondered whether the reaction to you of looking at the Dutch government's drive to promote English with these state funded clear Dutch English schools I don't think you should go there that's just about the worst reputation for keeping languages exactly exactly sorry, I didn't really want to interrupt that that's fine, thank you thank you so much for an extreme I enjoyed myself, it was a great audience such a great audience, thank you I have literally hundreds of questions but we'll deal with that in another context I'm also very pleased for all the very good comments but in terms of the issue around you talking about the dialects and so on well, we've got a few Singaporeans here while you start speaking to your children exactly it's true the other thing that I think that is worth really looking at at some stage is not the deep net or the dark net but what is actually happening online because in lots of ways governments, policies and so on except if they really become big, big, big brother I'm not really going to see what happens there so go online and write in Hokkien anyway, can we please thank Francesco thank you