Chuen Shin is a linguistics student interested in the documentation and preservation of languages, especially of Chinese “dialects” in Singapore. She is currently in her final year of pursuing a double (bachelor’s) degree at the National University of Singapore and Waseda University, Tokyo. 

Studying Singapore Hainanese Speakers’ Evaluation of Changes in Language Policy Through Their Style Variation 

The following study is a production task designed to study Singapore Hainanese speakers’ evaluation of the government’s seeming growing support for “Chinese dialects.” In Singapore, “Chinese dialects” tend to refer to varieties of Chinese other than Mandarin. Singapore Hainanese is also an endangered language. The study showed that while Hainanese speakers are likely to approve of the government’s efforts, they also tend to view Hainanese as a less ideal language choice. These contradicting language attitudes reveal why the preservation of Hainanese, and the current variety of languages in Singapore, is a complex task. Furthermore, this study reveals how differences between languages can influence style performance among endangered language speakers. Implosives are sounds relatively unique to Hainanese in the Singapore (Chinese) language ecology. When discouraged from using Hainanese in the production task, speakers tend to make their implosives less pronounced, and are more likely to produce sounds found in mainstream languages in place of implosives. This behaviour suggests that implosives, or lack thereof, might be used by Singapore Hainanese speakers to regulate their performances as Hainanese speakers.