Mr HarryLKY biggest sin is to eradicate dialects and forced all Singaporean Chinese to become Mandarins against their will. He was brought up a Hakka-Baba, but it still surprises me why Hokkien or a Nationalised Min-Nan-Cantonese Language was not mother tongue for the Singaporean Chinese Diaspora.
However, we Min Nan people never see Hakka as pure southerners as they were Northern Chinese that came to Southern China during the late Song Dynasty - just when the Jurchens were pushing southwards, due to the massive horde of Mongol warlords going Southbound.
At least Hokkien will not divide and marginalise the Malays and Tamils, it being part of the Bazzar lingua and have loan words in each languages, vice versa. Mandarin, PuTongHua, or Qing Court Speech could be given 3rd language status just as French, German and Japanese, - language for economic purposes, not as a cultural mother tongue so foreign to every Southern Chinese. In fact, Min Nan has 7 tones, Cantonese, 9 - both vestiges of the Classical Chinese once spoken in the mighty Han,Tang and Southern Song dynasties. Mandarin with 4 tones, was a simplified version with supplanted vocabulary of the Northern Hordes of subsequent invaders, Jurchen, Mongol, and Manchu. It is for the Northern Chinese with the admixture of these invaders. While us Southerners, we were either escapees from the war, or survivors of the Great Dynasties Based in the South - a mixture of Chu (mostly) /Qin Soldiers who came down to the Deep Maritime South from the Yangtze Plains in Hunan (Chu) or Henan (Qin) Province with the local indigenous women of the Deep South bodering Vietnam and the Southern Sea. It is an honour for me to see regionalism in China revived, as it was once proposed by Sun Yat Sen, the liberator of the South from the Qing Dynasty. 2 languages for each side of the Yangtze River. The only problem was that the Southern side had a plethora of Min, Cantonese, Wu, Yue, Gan, Hakka, Ping, Xiang Variants of Chinese, along with a wider range of tribal minorites. The South was the economic powerhouse, the first to open to the world compared to the Insular West and North. However, unlike the North, it was divided along provincial lines, based on clans and linguistic groups. Thus the North suceeded in cultural supremacy, and we, the Southerners have been oppressed since the days of the Qin-Chu rivalry, then Jin-Southern Song rivalry and the subsequent waves of Mongol Hordes and Tungusic peoples like the Jurchen and Manchu later.
Mandarin for the Singaporean Southern Han Diaspora, is a supplated mother tongue by LKY - it's a language for solely economical purpose and other motives. So please discard it except for the reason stated above and retrieve the roots that vanished a generation ago. 普通话是满族在清国北京宫话， 不是閩南族,粤族, 吴, 赣族, 客家族等等的语言。。。 普通话包含蒙古，满族的字母和音调，不是南宋，唐，大汉，秦国的语言。南方的人已经受到差不多八百至一千年的北狄, 匈奴，蒙古，女真, 满族 - （北汉的盟友)的欺压。孙中山从今在中華民國(ROC)独立间提过南方语言的重要性，因为南汉从汉国创立后是華文化，经济，買賣中心。我们三四代前的祖先是来自从收集最多外来影响的广东/西，福建，潮洲，海南，台湾，江西（少数从浙江，上海）的沿海洲。所以 - 宫话不是母语 - 是李光耀和满朝官廷设计的阴谋。抛弃普通话，取回重学真正的母语 - 閩南種語，粵語， 等等 - 取回被夺走的根.
