Dialect at risk of dying out

• oxford mushroom

  21 Mar 07, 15:05

  Originally posted by MooKu:

  Are dialect languages still relevant? Is it necessary to preserve something that's losing its usefulness?

  With a new generation of PRCs who grow up speaking Mandarin rather than dialects, there is no economic reasons to preserve dialects. By all means, speak it if you want to but a government should think about the future economic interests of its policies.
  
• ndmmxiaomayi

  21 Mar 07, 15:09

  Originally posted by Ah Cek:

  join us here
  
  http://sgforums.com/?action=thread_display&thread_id=241313[/url]

  Spoken is better. Sometimes, it's very hard to decipher because of the different spelling.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  21 Mar 07, 15:10

  Originally posted by countdracula:

  dialects can be divisive, the less spoken the better...

  Anything can be divisive...
• dracky

  21 Mar 07, 17:56

  Chinese Singaporeans are already struggling to learn proper Chinese and English. Learning dialects will just be too much of a strain. The way I see it: the only dialect speakers in the long term will be the cultural elites who bother to learn dialects and the underclass who didn't get a shot at formal education. The bulk of Singaporean will speak some dialect phrases here and there but not well enough to make any election speeches in dialects.
• GHoST_18

  21 Mar 07, 18:02

  it's only a matter of time before that happens...
• Kuali Baba

  22 Mar 07, 02:30

  OOT: The same goes for Baba Malay.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  22 Mar 07, 02:42

  Originally posted by Eric Cartman:

  ITS NOT THE LANGUAGE IT IS HOW GOOD YOU ARE WITH THE LANGUAGE BECOS THEY USE CANTONESE EVERYDAY. IT IS THE SAME FOR EVERY COUNTRY THAT SPEAKS 1 LANGUAGE WHEREAS SG IS A JACK OF ALL TRADES, THATS WHY WE HAVE PEOPLE LIKE JACK NEO AND MARK LEE ALTHOUGH NOW THEY SEEM A LITTLE BETTER
  
  OH YA AND ALSO THE NEW GIRL FROM THAT COMEDIC STAR SHOW WHO WEARS BUCKTEETH, WE'RE ALREADY FULL OF DIALECTS, PRETENDING TO HAVE AN ACCENT OF DIALECT ISNT FUNNY

  She's a Malaysian.
• mancha

  22 Mar 07, 10:03

  The Peoples' Republic of China suppress dialects and impose Mandarin for the purpose of unification.
  Singapore suppress dialects because of the belief that it will hamper the introduction of Mandarin.
  But why Mandarin?
  Why not the same for India?
  If French brings in the big bucks?
• Short Ninja

  22 Mar 07, 12:39

  Originally posted by Kuali Baba:

  OOT: The same goes for Baba Malay.

  The last time i checked there were less than 3,000 speakers of the peranakan language.10 or 15 yeaqrs ago there was a prominent baba guy in SIngapore who tried to revive this language by giving language courses,with the arrival of Indonesian Chinese in the late 90s .Every week somewhere in the World a language would become extinct we can only hope that this one dont die off so suddenly.