Choreographies of Multilingualism: Writing and Language Ideology in Singapore

Abstract

Writing is a key medium in the discursive production of the multilingual order in Singapore, one deployed by various agents to organize language relations for public consumption. At stake are competing narratives developed and circulated through official and grassroots approaches to multilingualism, such as the political tensions surrounding the marginalization, celebration, or appropriation of Singlish. These tensions make writing a prime site for examining intersecting language ideological visions on how multilingual Singapore is to be imagined. In Choreographies of Multilingualism, Tong King Lee explores how multilingualism is variedly performed in Singapore by examining the dynamic of language power across a wide array of written genres, including street signage, institutional anthologies, language primers, social media-based poetry, advertisements, and text-based memorabilia. Bringing together theoretical perspectives from sociolinguistics, multimodal semiotics, translation, and cultural studies, the book demonstrates that multilingualism in Singapore is an emergent and evolving construct through which identities and ideologies are negotiated and articulated. Broad-ranging in scope and cross-disciplinary in orientation, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian multilingualism, World Englishes, and vernacular literature.