Reminder: LDC Institute Presentation by Harold Schiffman

[James J. Fiumara]

Dear Friends,

The Linguistic Data Consortium is hosting the next LDC Institute today,
February 26, 2004 from 12:30-2:30pm in the LDC Conference Room, Suite
810, 3600 Market Street.

Harold F. Schiffman from Penn's Department of South Asia Studies will be
presenting "Tongue-Tied in Singapore: A Language Policy for Tamil?"

Please Note: Directions to the LDC can be found at:
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Contact/

A pizza lunch will be provided. We hope that you can attend.

More information about the LDC Institute series can be found at:
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/LDC_Institute

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Tongue-Tied in Singapore: A Language Policy for Tamil?

The Tamil situation in Singapore is one that lends itself ideally to the
study of minority language maintenance. The Tamil community is small and
its history and demographics are well known. The Singapore educational
system supports a well-developed and comprehensive bilingual education
program for its three major linguistic communities on an egalitarian
basis, so Tamil is a sort of test-case for how well a small language
community can survive in a multilingual society where larger groups are
doing well. But Tamil is acknowledged by many to be facing a number of
crises; Tamil as a home language is not being maintained by the
better-educated, and Indian education in Singapore is also not living up
to the expectations many people have for it. Educated people who love
Tamil are upset that Tamil is becoming thought of as a 'coolie' language
and regret this very much. Since Tamil is a language characterized by
extreme diglossia, there is the additional pedagogical problem of trying
to maintain a language with two variants, but with a strong cultural
bias on the part of the educational establishment for maintaining the
literary dialect to the detriment of the spoken one. This paper examines
these attempts to maintain a highly-diglossic language in emigration and
concludes that the well-meaning bilingual educational system actually
produces a situation of subtractive bilingualism.