Mandarin Is Public in Singapore and Private Among Chinese Americans
Singapore maintains Mandarin through public institutions; Chinese American families carry it through inheritance.
Chinese Singaporeans often have a public relationship to Mandarin as part of a national language project. The state assigns it as the default mother tongue and reinforces it through schooling, even when English is the language they actually live in at home.
This is further complicated by the fact that many Chinese Singaporeans are several generations removed from the families who came from Southern China. Those families spoke Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, Hainanese, or other Chinese languages, not necessarily standard Mandarin. By the time you get to younger generations, they may not speak those inherited languages very comfortably either. Mandarin was not simply waiting for them in the household. For many of them, learning it happened in Singapore, through bilingual education, the Speak Mandarin Campaign, and the institutions that made Mandarin the common Chinese language across different dialect groups. Singapore did not invent Mandarin, but it made Mandarin Singaporean.
Chinese Americans often have a more private relationship to Mandarin—or to another Chinese language. It comes through parents, grandparents, household expectations, or not at all.
The ancestry is continuous, but the language is not. Singapore keeps Mandarin publicly present and institutionally reinforced, while Chinese Americans usually encounter a Chinese language through the particular continuity—or rupture—of a family. In one case, a national system helps carry the language; in the other, the family does.