Singapore's Speak Mandarin Campaign Oct 22, 2026

Description

Tan Bah Bah, a Singaporean journalist, remembered that when he was a boy, it was difficult to get a taxi at 8:45pm. The drivers were all in coffee shops listening to a man tell stories in Hokkien on the radio.

His name was Ong Toh, and he was on Rediffusion, a cable radio service broadcast into houses and coffee shops via a small brown receiver. As soon as it reached 8:45pm, Tan remembered, the clinking of coffee cups would stop. Rediffusion had a storyteller for the major Chinese dialects: Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and Hakka. These were the languages that most Chinese Singaporeans' grandparents spoke, which they had brought from southern China.

For Cantonese, the storyteller was Lee Dai Sor. One listener remembered that every night after dinner, the kids would climb onto grandma's bed and she would tell them about that night's Lee Dai Sor story.

In 1979, Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister, launched the Speak Mandarin Campaign. He was worried about the kids. They were growing up speaking dialect at home, and then had to learn both English and Mandarin at school. Lee argued that few could cope with all three. He admitted the government couldn't control the language families spoke at home. But it could control the airwaves. Broadcasters were told to stop all dialect programming by the end of 1982.

Lee Dai Sor's last broadcast was on December 30th, 1982. After that, he continued to tell stories in person, at clan association halls.

Among children, the campaign worked. Over the next decade, the share of Chinese first-graders from mainly Mandarin-speaking households rose from 26% to 69%. Chinese Singaporeans of different dialectal backgrounds now had a common language. Lawrence Wong, the current prime minister, has said that he did not hear much Mandarin when he was young, and learned it from the Channel 8 dramas that his family watched every night.

The campaign did not work on the grandparents, though. In the 2020 census, 70% of Chinese Singaporeans over 85 still spoke mostly dialect at home.

This was the deal: the grandchildren got a common language, but the grandparents lost their storytellers on the radio. The government still allows a little bit of dialect broadcasting for them, a Friday morning slot and short news broadcasts. The rationale it gave to Parliament in 2023 was to convey information and government policies to this generation.