Tamil Language in Multilingual Singapore: Key Issues in Teaching and Maintaining a Minority Language

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how Tamil, a minority language in Singapore, is being maintained by institutionalising it. As one of four official languages in Singapore, Tamil is taught from pre-primary to junior colleges as Mother Tongue, but its survival is threatened by the linguistic heterogeneity of the wider Indian community and a shift among Tamil–English bilinguals towards the link language or lingua franca of Singapore, English, even in the home domain. Tamil is now a household language to only about 37% of the Indian population. This emerging pattern of language use has been of concern to policy makers and curriculum planners, and has led to a review of pedagogical approaches that questions the functionality and relevance of the language variety being taught in schools. To survive, the Tamil language has to live beyond the boundaries of the classroom and respond to the changing needs of a younger generation of Tamil bilinguals, and the continual demographic changes of twenty first century Singapore.