Grandmother Tongue

It's a scene all too familiar. A young man struggling to connect with his 84-year-old Teochew-speaking grandmother. In Singapore, dialects have been losing relevance for generations. After premiering to rave reviews at the Singapore Theatre Festival 2016, Grandmother Tongue is back by popular demand. The play by playwright and director Thomas Lim examines the social costs of our mother-tongue language policy and the erasure of dialects in today's Singapore. In ways both humorous and heartbreaking, Grandmother Tongue explores how our identities are bound up with the languages that we use and the ones that we lose.