Nirmala Srirekam PuruShotam, Negotiating language, constructing race: Disciplining difference in Singapore. (Contributions to the sociology of language, 79.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998. Pp. viii, 294. Hb DM 178.00.

Abstract

Singapore has been much discussed as a highly developed, multilingual, multicultural city-state with a clearly articulated language policy, implemented by a strong government as part of its efforts at social engineering. Singapore's policies are variously derided and praised. Some of those who have written on the sociology of language in Singapore have reiterated government policy with little or no assessment of its meaning; thus one regularly reads that all children in Singapore receive education in English and in their mother tongue – a statement that cannot be understood without a grasp of what the concept “mother tongue” means in Singapore's socio-political system. PuruShotam's book comes from a group of scholars who are working with a theoretically informed perspective on language and ethnicity, which questions terminologies and seeks to understand how notions like “race,” “mother tongue,” and “language” work as social constructs. In Singapore this approach has been especially associated with the sociologists Geoffrey Benjamin, Sharon Siddique, Chua Beng Huat, and PuruShotam herself.