Commentary: Why Dear You hit us so hard – and what it says about our feelings toward ‘dialects’

Commentary: Why Dear You hit us so hard – and what it says about our feelings toward ‘dialects’ At its heart, the fervour around the Teochew-language film is not about disagreement with Singapore’s language policy. It is grief for a dying language, says NTU linguistics professor Tan Ying Ying. SINGAPORE: Why did a film from China, shot almost entirely in Teochew language on a modest budget with mostly non-professional actors, create such a storm in Singapore? Tickets for the initial eight screenings of Dear You in Teochew were reportedly snapped up in under two hours. Days later, all 4,800 tickets to eight additional screenings were sold out about an hour after they became available on Monday (Jun 22). Some declared online that they would cross the Causeway to Johor Bahru just to watch the film in its original language. The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) had earlier decided that a Mandarin-dubbed version would be used for general release, with the Teochew version only allowed for festival and niche screenings. This has sparked swift and passionate debate about Singapore's language policies. Local filmmakers Eric Khoo and Jack Neo wrote a forum letter, calling the policy “outdated”. My colleague Luke Lu penned a CNA commentary questioning whether it is time to rethink restrictions on Chinese “dialects” in mainstream media. But is this really all about the policy? BUZZ OVER FILMS WITH DIALECT It seems that every time a film uses a Chinese “dialect”, it creates a buzz disproportionate to the occasion. Two years ago, How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, a Thai film with only a handful of lines in Teochew, touched a raw nerve across Singapore, mine included. Over two decades ago, Jack Neo's Money No Enough, with its generous portions of Hokkien, was a home run at the local box office. Other films have drawn similar, if quieter, public fascination. What is it about films with “dialect” in them? Everyone has been quick to point to the Speak Mandarin Campaign. Launched in 1979, it aimed to make Mandarin the unifying language for Singaporean Chinese, sacrificing in the process Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and other non-Mandarin Chinese languages. (They are not actually “dialects”, which are variants of a single language.) In fact, the campaign was so successful that these languages no longer threaten Mandarin. It is English that does. The conditions that justified restricting “dialect” media in 1979 do not describe Singapore in 2026. The policies speak of the ghost of a past anxiety. But the ghosts alone cannot explain how passionate the response has been. A GRIEF FOR WHAT’S NO LONGER SPOKEN And here is what I think is really going on: People are responding to loss. The fervour around Dear You is not, at its heart, disagreement with a policy. It is grief. It is grief for a language that is dying. According to the 2020 census, only 1.4 per cent of Singaporean Chinese aged 5 to 34 used a Chinese “dialect” as their most frequent language at home. Among those aged 60 and above, that figure was 31.6 per cent. The people buying those tickets are not, by and large, fluent Teochew speakers seeking to improve their vocabulary. Many of them are probably not even Teochew themselves. They are people who may have once heard this language and have since lost access to it. People buy the tickets also because the film promises them something increasingly rare: A few hours of hearing a language that has become, in their own lifetimes, a kind of novelty. What Dear You does, and what How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies did before it, is give that language loss a narrative shape. These films do not romanticise the loss. We do. And we do so precisely because the Singapore outside the cinema is no longer speaking the language. The Teochew in these films is not incidental. It is part of what gives them their emotional force. Remove the Teochew, and you have a family drama. Keep it, and the story becomes an elegy that speaks of memory, inheritance and disappearance. THE GREAT IRONY OF THE SPEAK MANDARIN CAMPAIGN But grief alone also does not explain the particular intensity of the public reaction. There is another factor at work here, and it is one of the great ironies of Singapore's language policies. By restricting the “dialects” from mainstream media for decades, the Speak Mandarin Campaign has made them forbidden. And forbidden things hold a peculiar power over the human imagination. It is not just the power of nostalgia, but one of transgression. The hunger people feel when they hear Teochew in a cinema is partly the hunger of the prohibited. Part of the fascination with Teochew today comes from its rarity. This rarity gives the language a symbolic weight it might never have possessed had it remained an ordinary part of everyday life. In trying to reduce the significance of Chinese “dialects”, the policy may have inadvertently increased their mystique. The very success of the policy helped create the conditions for the nostalgia we see today. It has, in this sense, engineered the very obsession it was meant to prevent. Sadly, none of this changes the reality: Public fascination is not the same as linguistic vitality, and a sold-out cinema is not a living language. The frenzy around Dear You is, if anything, evidence of how much these languages are already on their last breaths. We do not queue two hours for something we have in abundance. We queue for something we fear we are about to lose forever, or have, in fact, already lost. Dear You has given us two hours to sit with that. Dr Tan Ying Ying is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at the School of Humanities in Nanyang Technological University.