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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes public evaluations of "the polyglot" in Singapore, a figure marked not by deficit or lack, but by an effusive plurilingualism. This figure reveals how anxieties over "Mother Tongue" imbue new moralizing layers to broad raciolinguistic anxieties in Singapore.

Paper long abstract:

Singapore is an officially multiracial, multilingual, multicultural locale. Yet members of the individual "races" that comprise Singapore's plural polity are not multilingual, but bilingual by design, speaking both English and the "Mother Tongue" assigned to their "race." Amid ongoing anxieties over English standards and the degree of Singaporeans' bilingualism, I examine a figure marked not by linguistic deficit or lack, but by effusive plurilingualism: "the polyglot." This figure gets publicly evaluated along two axes—fluency and virtuosity—in various combinatorial arrangements. I approach fluency/virtuosity as a metalinguistic model that points not toward ways of speaking, but toward the authority of the evaluator. Paradoxically on its surface, the evaluator does not necessarily get positioned through their acts of evaluation as themselves either fluent or virtuosic, even as their acts of evaluation reinforce the categories of fluency/virtuosity as relevant evaluative metrics. Such evaluations of fluency/virtuosity articulate with, yet are detachable from, "Mother Tongues," which occupy a distinct, privileged status—even for polyglot individuals. I analyze ethnographic observations alongside mediatized reports of Singaporean politicians' and political volunteers' language-use; online commentaries on a viral video of a hawker's code-switching sales pitch in 2020; and public reports on "the polyglot," a Singaporean student with "exceptional" linguistic abilities. I argue that, when considered through the figure of the polyglot, concerns over "Mother Tongue" can be seen to imbue new moralizing layers to generalized raciolinguistic anxieties around speech production in Singapore, thus heightening both the systemic risks and rewards entailed by decisions to publicly speak one's "Mother Tongue"—or not.