It was 20 years ago.
A group of students taking the project work (PW) subject at A Levels thought to embark on a ‘controversial’ topic: reviving dialect speaking amongst our generation.
Never mind the topic that year was actually ‘Maintaining momentum’ (the other topic was maintaining tradition, but we didn’t want to paint dialects as a tradition) – we thought there was a bit more momentum in reversing the policy at that point in time.
Guess we were wrong.
Anyways, if you look into our presentation deck, it was just a glimpse of the research work we did and ideas we had. There were interviews with teachers, clan associations, social welfare organisations, primary surveys with students, peers. Even if only some of those ideas were implemented, perhaps we won’t grieve the loss as much (as Prof Tan Ying Ying written in her commentary on CNA).
But it’s too late. And it’s not much to do with policy anymore.
English language was perhaps too successful, with our education system and the employment market providing all of the carrots and sticks necessary to beat us into shape. Think about the people who actually did not lose their dialect abilities. They were the ones who weren’t quite in the system to be beaten into shape.
In our project, we even considered why it was important to keep this part of us. We thought about communication, cultural transmission, social divides, and public service.
20 years ago, we came up with all of these. But perhaps we didn’t believe in it enough. Some of us who entered public service did not enter the arts, heritage, culture or social sector. Most of us were successful in the system.
Surely it was not up to us for sensibilities to prevail.