Day 14

The day started quite horribly as I lost my phone on the bus ride to work, and could not trace it - which meant I had to get a replacement phone during the lunch break today. So this did keep me mildly distracted during the morning as I tried to sort it out. However getting it replaced allowed me to go back to concentrating on work, and I was able to finish transcribing the fourth FGD, and have started on the 6th FGD (since the 5th was not recorded).

Trying to transcribe this FGD was a little bit more difficult as there were parts spoken in Hokkien which I did not entirely understand (though I could make out bits and pieces here and there). It was quite interesting hearing the elderly switch between Chinese and Hokkien, as if they were aware that Chinese was more "convenient" for the group, but Hokkien was the main "comfort" language, the one they were most at home with and would slip back to now and then.

It made me think about how different the generations have become in such a short span of years, just because of the policies instituted with regards to the "official" language of Singapore and the education system, with English becoming the medium of communication. While dialect is the most comfortable for my grandmother's generation (and mandarin is passable but not their preferred language necessarily), my mother's generation is most comfortable with English or Chinese in general, while dialect is still used quite frequently, and the majority of my generation is most comfortable with English (although Chinese is still used quite a fair bit) and dialect has almost completely disappeared from our vocabularies. This is of course to do with my specific ethnic group (Chinese) and doesn't speak for the other ethnic groups (such as the Malays and Indians, where for example the Malays do use their mother tongue to quite a large extent still).

What intrigues me is how in a short span of about 40-50 years we have completely changed our mode of communication, and how this seems to be more prevalent amongst the Chinese than the other ethnic groups. This has of course had wider repurcussions, in terms of creating quite a large language and communication barrier between the generations, particularly between mine and my grandparents' generation. Amongst my friends as it is I'm one of the "better" ones in that I can understand and speak Cantonese (although I still need to expand my vocabulary), and I am very comfortable speaking in Mandarin. Most of my friends cannot understand or speak any dialect (except for the vulgarities), and they are not fluent in Mandarin either.

The problem then is that, as it is, the generations already have gaps due to the different environments in which we grew up. With society and technology advancing as rapidly as it is, this gap (in terms of understanding) will simply continue to grow. Having an additional barrier to communication and "connectedness" due to langauge differences makes it even harder to connect to our grandparents generation. Personally this is one of the reasons why working directly with the elderly would be more difficult for me, and I suspect that this might be the case for my peers as well (thus deterring us from going into the eldercare sector).

For my fellow social work students (in my cohort), we have been wanting a proper "dialect school" to be set up to help us learn how to speak the more common dialects in Singapore, so that we will be able to communicate more easily with the elderly. This obviously has yet to be set up, but it is an area that could be looked into. For all the government's talk of wanting to keep family ties in place, one of the greatest keys is communication (as the FGD participants have all pointed out), and so something needs to be done to educate the younger generation (who can still absorb and learn more) so that they can communicate with the elderly, to strengthen these family bonds. The issue is whether the younger generation sees the need for this and can be bothered to learn. Particularly since dialects seem to be "dying out" or at least becoming a rare breed, whether this is even necessary (though I would say it is even if only to preserve our heritage) might be brought up. Ultimately it's whether there is a need from the ground up, which can fit into (and fill) the gap that has sprung up between the generations, which society (and the govenrment) thinks there is a need to address.