The Polyglot: Plurilingual Wonders, “Mother Tongue” Hegemony, and Totalizing Images in and of Singapore

Abstract

Singapore is an officially multiracial, multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious locale defined nationally by its “multi” status. Despite this, Singaporeans routinely find themselves targeted by discourses that evaluate their supposed deficiencies in English and their state-assigned “Mother Tongues,” even as these languages get positioned as dually necessary for full participation in a globalized world and authentic ethnoracial personhood. Against this backdrop, this article examines a mediatized figure marked not by deficit but excess: “the polyglot.” While almost all Singaporeans potentially fit this category, few become viral or newsworthy based on this attribution. I show how, despite their multilingual abilities, public commentators still judge polyglots for their ability to perform their standardized “Mother Tongues”—or not—thereby investing the figure with moralizing evaluations linked to generalized anxieties centered on language, history, the state, and Singaporeanness. I argue that the polyglot embodies a dominant yet ultimately exclusionary image of Singapore-as-“multi,” a totalizing image and image of totality that is simultaneously made both urgent and existentially impossible through the hegemony of the standardized, state-backed, and broadly recognized model for recognizing official “races” and their “Mother Tongues.”