Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s 2026 Mandarin National Day Rally speech contained a welcome, if not entirely unexpected, announcement.

The Government will lift the cap on screenings of dialect films, as long as a Mandarin-dubbed version is also available. Restrictions on dialect content on pay television will also be eased.

There was good news on the learning of the Chinese language too. One in four Secondary 1 students studying Chinese is now taking Higher Chinese, after the eligibility criteria were relaxed in 2026 to allow more students who are strong in the language to enrol.

Yet, a more troubling trend appeared to occupy the Prime Minister’s mind.

The linguistic balance in Chinese homes has effectively flipped. Most now speak mainly English; only about a third use Mandarin.

Singapore must guard against becoming monolingual and losing its Asian identity and character, PM Wong warned.

Then came the more consequential acknowledgement: Families cannot do this alone.

“To learn Mandarin well, there must be a supportive social environment where it is used in everyday life. Only then can our mother tongues remain living languages,” he said.

That last point is worth dwelling on, because if a language needs a social environment in which it is actually used, the question is not simply how to persuade families to speak more Mandarin.

It is also what kind of environment Singapore has created for its different languages – and what that means for the choices people make.

Singapore’s bilingual policy grew out of the economic and social imperatives facing a young, multilingual nation struggling to survive after independence.

English became the common working language and the language of administration, commerce and education. The officially designated mother tongues – Mandarin, Malay and Tamil – were given another job: transmitting culture, values and identity.

The logic sounded sensible: English would connect Singaporeans to one another and to the world; the mother tongues would keep us connected to our roots.

And the hierarchy that resulted was not accidental.

English was deliberately given a privileged place in national life – it offered Singapore access to the global economy while providing a common language that did not belong to any of its three main ethnic groups. Its rise is one of the foundations of Singapore’s economic success and social cohesion.

But that choice inevitably shaped the prospects of our other languages too.

Sociolinguists including Low Ee Ling, Anne Pakir, Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen and Sun Baoqi have examined how the status and utility attached to languages influenced the choices made by parents, teachers and students. And the incentives were hardly equal.

English became the language of academic advancement, social mobility and economic opportunity. It was not simply another subject that children had to pass. It also became the language through which most other subjects were taught and assessed, and later the main language used in Singaporean workplaces.

Mother tongue proficiency carried cultural value, but much less material reward.

Language scholar Stephen May has written about what happens when languages are divided along such lines: One dominates the economically and politically powerful parts of life, while another is largely confined to cultural or private ones.

Families respond accordingly, gravitating towards the language that gives their children the greatest opportunities.

This is the paradox at the heart of Singapore’s bilingual experiment: We sought to produce bilingual citizens while deliberately building institutions around one common language.

This was not always the configuration of Singapore education.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Singapore experimented with a much more demanding form of bilingual education. Both English and the mother tongue were compulsory and, from the early 1970s, given double weight in the PSLE.

But the results were poor.

The landmark 1978 review of the education system led by then Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee found that less than 40 per cent of students were achieving minimum competency in two languages. Among students learning English and Mandarin, about 85 per cent spoke neither at home.

For many Chinese students, for instance, the home language was Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese or other Chinese varieties.

The Goh Report paved the way for the New Education System, including streaming according to students’ learning abilities. English increasingly became the common medium of instruction, with the mother tongue taught alongside it.

In 1979, the Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched just as the education system was consolidating around English.

Schools would increasingly provide the English environment. Chinese families, meanwhile, were encouraged to replace dialects with Mandarin and provide the Mandarin environment at home.

The intended language shift was from dialect to Mandarin, but over the decades that followed, English became increasingly dominant at home too.

In 2010, 32.3 per cent of Singapore residents spoke English most frequently at home based on census data. By 2020, the figure had reached 48.3 per cent.

Among Chinese residents, it rose from 32.6 per cent to 47.6 per cent over the decade. Among Malays, from 17 per cent to 39 per cent. Among Indians, from 41.6 per cent to 59.2 per cent.

By 2025, English had become the main home language of 58.1 per cent of residents, based on the General Household Survey. Mandarin had fallen to 26.6 per cent and Chinese dialects to just 4.9 per cent.

This does not mean Singapore has suddenly become monolingual. Among residents who mainly spoke English at home in 2025, 80.5 per cent also used a vernacular language as their second most frequently spoken home language.

Nor are families somehow powerless to resist the trend. Parents decide what language they speak to their children. Individuals decide what they read and watch and what languages they use with their friends.

But when the choices made by families move so consistently in the same direction over several generations, it is worth asking what is shaping them.

A major Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) study published in 2026 offers part of the answer.

Based on a survey of 4,000 residents in 2024, it found English overwhelmingly present not only at work but also in Singaporeans’ social lives. Among respondents aged 18 to 35, 96.5 per cent frequently used English with friends.

English has therefore acquired something the mother tongues were always supposed to possess: emotional attachment.

It is the language many Singaporeans now use not just to sit examinations or write reports, but also to make friends, tell jokes, quarrel, fall in love and talk to their children. And somewhere along the way, we made it our own and called it Singlish.

In the IPS study, 57.8 per cent of respondents said they could speak Singlish well, up from 46.8 per cent in 2013. Among 18- to 35-year-olds, the figure was 80 per cent.

More than half of the respondents frequently used Singlish with friends, and 57.8 per cent agreed that it gave Singaporeans a sense of identity.

This is quite a journey for a language variety once disparaged as broken English.

Singlish absorbed vocabulary, rhythms and structures from the languages around it and became unmistakably Singaporean.

We use it to convey shades of humour, exasperation, affection and solidarity that Standard English sometimes cannot quite capture.

Nobody had to instruct Singaporeans to feel emotionally attached to Singlish.

We became attached to it because we use it.

That should tell us something important about language policy.

Simply designating a language as the bearer of culture does not make it so.

Our sense of identity is also guided by the languages we actually use.

In Singapore, English has increasingly become one of them, with Singlish perhaps its most distinctly local expression.

There is an irony in this English success story.

English has become so dominant that we increasingly think of ourselves as an English-speaking society. Yet ubiquity should not be confused with mastery.

Young Singaporeans perform exceptionally well on conventional measures of literacy. In the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) latest Survey of Adult Skills, 16- to 24-year-olds averaged 285 points in literacy, above the OECD average of 260. The IPS study is similarly encouraging: 97.3 per cent of 18- to 35-year-olds said they spoke English well or very well.

Across the adult population, however, Singapore averaged 255 points in OECD literacy testing, below the OECD average. Thirty per cent had low literacy proficiency, against an OECD average of 26 per cent. The generational divide was particularly large: Those aged 55 to 65 scored 61 points below 25- to 34-year-olds, twice the average gap of the OECD for these age groups.

None of this means Singaporeans are bad at English. Nor does speaking Singlish signify a poor command of Standard English. Many Singaporeans move comfortably between the two.

But there is a difference between being able to function comfortably in English and having the command of it to express complex or nuanced ideas precisely.

These abilities are much harder to measure, so we have no good way of knowing how consistently Singaporeans command English at this level.

But if even the language that dominates our lives does not produce uniform mastery, we should be realistic about what classroom instruction alone can achieve for languages we use far less.

Proficiency has to be continually exercised if it is to be maintained and deepened. And that is as true of our mother tongues as it is of English.

The IPS findings do not point to a simple march towards monolingualism. Singaporeans still value their mother tongues, and substantial numbers believe they have practical value.

But the imbalance of power between our languages is clear.

English now operates across almost every part of Singapore life: education, work, government, social life and increasingly the home. Our mother tongues retain cultural and familial value and, in some settings, economic usefulness. But they operate across fewer domains.

That is why the easing of restrictions on dialects is welcome but insufficient.

For decades, dialects were deliberately discouraged in favour of Mandarin. Today, they are being welcomed back as cultural heritage.

But cultural recognition is not the same as restoring a language’s social life.

The loss is especially difficult to reverse with dialects. Their use in Chinese homes has fallen so far that many young Singaporeans no longer possess enough of a dialect to have a conversation in it.

The result in some families is a peculiar three-generation divide: dialect-speaking grandparents, bilingual children and English-dominant grandchildren who may struggle to communicate with one another in the language once shared by the family.

Higher Chinese faces a different version of the same problem.

Expanding access to it is worthwhile, but producing more proficient students increases the supply of good Mandarin speakers; it does not necessarily increase demand for their proficiency after they leave school.

This does not mean Singapore should diminish the role of English. Its position as our common working language was a deliberate choice made for compelling reasons, and remains one of Singapore’s great advantages.

Nor can responsibility for sustaining our mother tongues simply be handed to the Government. Families ultimately decide what they speak at home. There is plenty that individuals, communities, cultural organisations and the media can do.

But PM Wong’s own observation about the need for a supportive social environment points to something larger than individual will.

If we want people to keep using a language, it helps if that language has things for them to do.

So perhaps the next review of bilingualism should spend less time asking how to improve the teaching of mother tongues, and more time asking what happens to them after people leave school.

Where are Mandarin, Malay and Tamil already genuinely useful in Singapore? Are there parts of healthcare, eldercare, social services, the media or public-facing work where stronger bilingual abilities would meet an existing need? Could universities and polytechnics do more to help students use these languages in professional contexts, rather than simply study them as subjects? And how much room do they have in our cultural, digital and civic lives?

The point is not to manufacture demand for our mother tongues or force people to use them. Nor is it to start teaching engineering in Chinese, Malay or Tamil.

It is to identify where genuine demand already exists and give these languages more room there – while recognising that families and individuals still have to choose to use them.

In fact, Singapore has already demonstrated what it takes for a language to thrive.

We built an entire world in which English was useful, then we took it home; we even remade it into Singlish.

If we want our mother tongues to remain living languages, they need more than our affection. They need somewhere to live.