The country's first academic study on mother tongue blogs shows that most Chinese blog authors focus on sharing personal experiences and discussing Chinese language and Chinese cultural topics. Political discussions are relatively rare, and those concerning current affairs are mostly moderate and balanced.
The Malay blog community also focuses on sharing personal experiences and interests, showing a strong interest in marriage and culinary topics, while content related to politics has gradually shifted from blogs to Facebook.
Tamil blogs present a completely different picture; the authors are mostly Indians living in Singapore, focusing on art and culture. Even when there is political discussion, the focus is often on Indian politics.
The Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) shared the results with the media on the 2nd after a four-month study on the three major local mother tongue blog spheres.
Arun Mahizhnan, a special research advisor at the Institute of Policy Studies who participated in the study, pointed out that this is the first time the country has conducted research on mother tongue blogs outside of mainstream English blogs, and it is a "good starting point for understanding non-English perspectives."
Starting with Blogs to Avoid Complexity
Although the researchers do not deny that a comprehensive study of the mother tongue online community should include social media platforms that are now more popular, such as Facebook and Twitter, they decided to start with blogs because doing so would be more complex, and Facebook has more privacy settings and is less public than blogs. Furthermore, they found that the content discussed by Chinese blog authors who have Facebook links was largely the same on both platforms.
Six researchers screened the three major mother tongue blog groups for analysis based on two main principles: first, at least half of the blog posts must be written in the mother tongue; second, at least half of the content must be related to Singapore.
As a result, the researchers identified 201 Chinese blogs, 30 Malay blogs, and 20 Tamil blogs.
Among the identifiable Chinese blog authors, more than half are women, primarily from the media, creative, and education sectors, with blog content focusing on personal experiences, interests, and cultural topics.
Dr. Sun Wanting, who is responsible for the research on Chinese blogs, believes that one of the reasons these authors write in Chinese is that most of them work in jobs related to the Chinese language, such as Chinese media practitioners, scholars of Chinese literature, and Chinese teachers, so "Chinese is an important part of their lives."
"Some of their blog posts also show their concern about the declining standard of the Chinese language."
In addition, Dr. Sun also noted that, unlike the English political blog community, which generally holds prejudices against mainstream media, "Chinese blog authors treat mainstream media as a source of information rather than an object of criticism."
However, there are actually not many Chinese blogs that focus on politics and policy; only seven or eight can be called socio-political blogs, and the content of their posts is generally balanced in perspective and objective in attitude.
Political Discussion Atmosphere in Chinese Blogs Is Not Intense
Regarding the lack of an intense atmosphere for political discussion in the local Chinese blog circle, well-known local Chinese blogger Yang Junwei believes that language proficiency limitations may be one of the factors: "Perhaps Singapore's education system has made us unaccustomed to discussing political or social topics in other languages, because English is the mainstream after all."
However, the study also found that these Chinese blog authors use pure Chinese when writing, without mixing in other languages, and their Chinese expression skills are strong, ranging from colloquial expressions to articles rich in literary talent.
Kuang Weixiong, who specializes in using his personal blog to share picture book creations, has consciously written his blog posts in pure Chinese. This is not only because he attended Chinese schools in primary school and has an affection for the Chinese language, but also because he targets his blog readership beyond Singapore to Chinese people elsewhere.
"I don't want to be too localized, because if I mix in too much Singlish, Chinese people in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan won't understand it."
The language used in Tamil blogs also follows a pure route, which researchers believe is related to the fact that this group of authors are mostly Indian expatriates.
Malay blog authors are mainly native Malays, who generally use informal Malay, mixed with various local expressions.
Dr. Sun Wanting pointed out that this study reflects that the diversity of the mother tongue blog world is no less than that of the English blog circle.
"Their differences lie not only in the topics discussed and the nature of the blog posts, but also in how they use their mother tongue to connect with their readers."
As for the reasons for these differences, Dr. Sun admitted that this study could not delve into them deeply, so she hopes this initial attempt will serve as a catalyst to inspire more scholars to conduct more in-depth research on this topic.
