Thursday 5 March 2009

Young not as multilingual

Young Singaporeans are not as multilingual as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, a symposium was told on Thursday.

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Guanyu said...

Young not as multilingual

By Jalelah Abu Baker
5 March 2009

Young Singaporeans are not as multilingual as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, a symposium was told on Thursday.

Said Dr Ng Bee Chin, Acting Head of the Nanyang Technological University’s Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies: ‘Although we are still multilingual, 40 years ago, we were even more multilingual. Young children are not speaking some of these languages anymore. ‘All it takes is one generation for a language to die.’

Dr Ng was speaking at the Language and Diversity Symposium, hosted by NTU’s Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, which was attended by more than 100 students, academics and international speakers.

The focus of the symposium was to discuss how to promote the preservation of many languages that are spoken all over the world. Linguistics experts from different countries presented their research papers on four main themes surrounding language diversity.

As part of the symposium, which ends on Friday, is an installation art exhibition titled ‘Singapore’s Voices,’ which marries linguistics, art and technology to make language a tangible item through photographs and sound.

The art piece presented photographs of the speakers of languages that are slowly becoming obsolete here. When touched, the people in the photographs ‘speak’ through light sensors.

The languages featured include Chinese dialects such as Teochew, Hakka and Hainanese, and also Indian languages such as Malayalam and Telugu.

It is estimated by experts that half of the 6,000 languages that are in use worldwide today will be extinct by 2050.

However, efforts can still be made to preserve existing languages, and to create new ones.

Professor Li Wei from the University of London, who is an active researcher in the field of bilingualism said: ‘One way to promote and protect linguistics is to allow contact among different cultures and people. New languages are created through such contact.’