Singapore is a culturally and linguistically diverse country with four official languages: Malay, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil, and English. The sociolinguistic profile of Singapore makes it an intriguing case of multilingualism at the societal level. This book investigates the institutional and grassroots writing in multilingual Singapore to reveal the complex ways in which multilingualism is imagined and performed. Knowing that institutional and grassroots multilingualism are intersected, Lee spends two chapters on institutional multilingualism and two chapters on grassroots multilingualism; the last chapter discusses the complicated relationship between them.
Institutional multilingualism in Singapore is exemplified by the public institutional signage in chapter 2 and the literary anthologies and cultural literacy programmes in chapter 3. Lee directs readers’ attention to the language choices and visual-spatial designs of Singapore's official multilingual writing and points out the linguistic hierarchies and identity work behind the official discourse. Overall, a quadrilingual schema seems to be applied to institutional multilingualism in Singapore. The different sequential varieties—such as English-Chinese-Malay-Tamil, Malay-Chinese-Tamil-English, and Malay-Tamil-Chinese-English—shed light on the relative powers and symbolic values assigned to the four languages. While all four languages are supposed to be equal, English often times has more salience than the others and works as the matrix language. In addition to analysing the presence of the official languages, Lee also invites readers to contemplate the absence of other languages and language varieties in Singapore's institutional writing practices.
The next two chapters focus on grassroots multilingualism in Singapore through investigating Gwee Li Sui's book Spiaking Singlish: A companion to how Singaporeans communicate and a Facebook-based literary initiative ‘Singapore Poetry Writing Month’. Lee's investigation of the literary culture showcases the high degree of heteroglossia in grassroots writing, which features Singlish and goes beyond code mixing. Singlish (also known as Colloquial Singapore English) is a vernacular where linguistic elements of non-English origins are incorporated into English. The mobilisation of Singlish in grassroots writing is particularly noteworthy because of its critical and political intentions. The use of Singlish is to disturb the status of English as the matrix language and challenge the assumption of Singlish as an inferior variety of Standard English in the official discourse. While commenting on such literary attempts in a laudatory tone, Lee reminds readers of the underpinning elitism and romanticism in the promotion of Singlish.
The author then moves on to demonstrate that although there are tensions between them, institutional multilingualism and grassroots multilingualism are not mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive. Singlish has become more visible in institutional writing, although it is still being marginalised. The grassroots writers also engage in institutional multilingual writing. In addition, there is the prevailing practice of commodifying Singlish that belongs to neither top-down or bottom-up writing. The author concludes the book by proposing a postmultilingual future for multilingualism in Singapore, which leaves readers with an alternative perspective to ponder.
