n Mandarin Chinese as a second language (in accordance with the “Mother Tongue Policy”) instead
of Malay. And then again in 2008, a Singaporean television drama series The Little Nyonya was aired in
Singapore, and was in Mandarin. Of interest, the Chinese community can afford to ease up on the use of
dialect(s), but Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (cited in Ong, 2014: 1) in the Speak Mandarin
Campaign, highlighted that it would not be practical to do so, and there is a need to ‘stick to Mandarin’ “to
maintain good standards” and to unite the Chinese.
That being the case, the Baba patois [“a Malay patois with Chinese words and phrases of the Hokkien dialect”
(Chia, 1980: 9) (Hokkien is a Southern Chinese dialect)] would, it seems, soon be lost and not be remembered;
further, without a written language, any culture would slowly die off and eventually disappeared.