When Competitive Authoritarian Regime Meets Multiculturalism: the Cultural Politics of Singlish

This thesis argues the Singapore regime has turned to be competitive authoritarian by examining its language policy. For the sake of recording and analyzing the cultural politics of Singlish, the author adopts the documentary and secondary analysis to attempt to answer: as an epitome of the multiculture in Singapore, why and how the Singapore government suppressed Singlish. Besides, this study shows the cause of language policy shifted over the last few years while putting Singapore under the framework of competitive authoritarianism. The conclusion discusses when Singapore shifts to a competitive authoritarian regime from an authoritarian regime, the Singapore government perceived that the Singaporeans persisted in using Singlish through some approaches, such as the films and the Internet. Therefore, it made the transformation of the cultural and identity policy in order to ally with the potential opponents as the purpose of the co-option. However, Singlish has become one of the most popular topics in the Internet. The change of the cultural politics of Singlish shows the link between the government and the people.