This paper examines the role of Singapore’s “national television” in engendering and contemporarizing a more autonomously hyphenated “Singaporean-Chinese” cultural identity through the local Chinese language popular music of Xinyao (新謠) from the early 1980s. As the genre is increasingly considered officially to be part of the republic’s intangible cultural heritage, the authors seek to revisit Xinyao’s evolution as part of the de-centering of Sinophone popular literature for a music that germinated autonomously from Mainland China. Leveraging from the Chinese language national media networks alongside with the official privileging of the Mandarin over “Chinese dialects,” Xinyao became a contemporary Sinophone enterprise in Singapore’s mediascape. Aside from the televised singing contests or “Chinese Talentimes” that engendered a new generation of performers and audiences among Singaporean youths, the theme songs of the popular locally produced Chinese language television dramas composed and sung by Xinyao artists have popularized the genre. Collectively, Xinyao served in Mandarinizing the sonic-linguistic cultural imaginations along the narratives of the nation-state in molding the National-Sinophone of the hyphenated “Singaporean-Chinese” cultural identity.

This Coda is a reflection on my own encounters with the multilingual realities of Singapore and my reading of the fascinating studies in the present volume. As a young nation, Singapore has made miracles not only in the economic sphere, but also linguistically by turning English from a colonial language to a national lingua franca and by imposing Mandarin Chinese onto the Chinese communities effectively eliminating the so-called Chinese ‘dialects’ in public domains. Singapore has proven to the world that societal multilingualism and individual bilingualism can be planned and managed successfully. Yet the 21st century brings an era of ‘liquid modernity’ where social structures and institutions change constantly and rapidly, and individuals need to adapt to different social positions and have multiple and fragmented lives and selves. In terms of language, the world is experiencing ‘liquid multilingualism’: no single individual can claim to know, or indeed need to know, an entire language; rather, multilinguals acquire and use bits of many different languages. And correspondingly, no single nation or community can claim the sole ownership, authority and responsibility for any particular language. This Coda explores liquid multilingualism in Singapore and its implications for sociolinguistics research.

This volume brings together researchers whose rich insights make for a comprehensive and up-to-date account of Singapore's rich linguistic diversity. Applying a combination of empirical, theoretical, and descriptive approaches, the authors investigate not only official languages such as English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, but also minority languages such as the Chinese vernaculars and South Asian and Austronesian languages. The chapters in this volume trace the historical development, contemporary status, and functions of these languages, as well as potential scenarios for the future. Exploring the tension between language policies and linguistic realities in Singapore, the contributions capture the shifting educational, political, and societal priorities over time.

Serving as an introduction to the volume, this chapter offers a brief background to the complex language ecology of Singapore. It sets out the rationale for, and role of, the national and education language policies in managing the sensitivities and competing interests of an ethnically diverse population. The chapter draws attention to pressures of enhanced linguistic heterogeneity and widespread shift to English over time upon the restrictive bilingual framework. By way of establishing the context for the volume, it offers a brief historical and contemporary overview of the language situation and challenges to the four official languages. The chapter then presents the rationale for and structure of the volume before concluding with an introduction to the various chapters.

Sebutan Johor-Riau (Johor-Riau Pronunciation) is a naturalized standard pronunciation based on the Johor-Riau accent. In contrast, Sebutan Baku (Standard Pronunciation) is an artificially created system of pronunciation that is officially prescribed as the preferred or more appropriate way of speaking ‘proper’ Malay. It was introduced in Singapore in 1993 as the standard pronunciation for Standard Malay as part of the state’s support for the standardisation of the Malay language in the region. This geopolitical initiative has since fallen through. Malaysia returned to Sebutan Johor-Riau in 2000 while Singapore retained the Sebutan Baku policy despite opposition from Malay Singaporeans who generally do not see it as authentically indexing their Malay identity. In this paper, we trace the development of Sebutan Johor-Riau, provide a critique of Sebutan Baku and the state’s rationale for continuing with the policy, and discuss the implications this tension between Sebutan Johor-Riau and Sebutan Baku has on the Malay Singaporean identity.

This chapter provides a number of the social and educational issues that surround a crucial part of educational policy and practice – the determination of "official knowledge". Formal schooling by and large is organised and controlled by the government. The political nature of education is also made more than a little visible in the current attempts in many nations to change the mode of governance of education. Education is thoroughly political in an even more practical and material way. Some of the very best analyses of education and power have been concerned with the way the state functions. As an entire range of critical scholarship has clearly demonstrated, this kind of approach can be employed creatively to uncover some of the truly major dynamics that determine the politics of education and that lead to social and cultural transformation. Hegemony is both discursive and political. It has as a major interest the creation of consent.