Hau tu spik Malaysian

Malaysia is constantly grappling with the role of English in the country and in the Malaysian language, Bahasa Malaysia. On the one hand, fluency in English is highly prized. The government’s latest initiative to improve English skills is that Math and Science courses will now be taught in English medium. On the other hand, English vocabulary is flooding into BM, which bothers many, especially when it displaces perfectly good BM equivalents. The newest Blog on my roll is MacVaysia, an English teacher in Rawang. He writes a lot about the language situation here, BM and English and …Manglish. Here’s an excerpt of some of his thoughts on the subject:

So what’s the fuss about? Well, the people raising the alarm are concerned not about English in Malaysia, but about English in Malay. They are alarmed by the large number of English words that are in common use in the Malay language. RTM has even banned some Malay songs that contain English lyrics, and the newspapers frequently contain letters from people upset by the use of English words in Malay TV and radio broadcasts. It is true that the average conversation between Malays will likely contain several English words, or at least words that are derived from English. Here’s a very short list of some common words:… Read the whole thing here.

There’s no such thing as a pure language, as he points out. English vocabulary is half Latin. BM had equal parts Arabic and Sanskrit before the flood of English. When I first visited Malaysia, I didn’t know any BM. But between my rudimentary Arabic vocabulary and my father’s Hindi, we could decipher a good deal of what we saw. So I don’t find anything inherently wrong with English entering now. It’s just a little too rapid, and perhaps a little too eagerly adopted. I submit for your consideration this photo I took a while back while driving through Klang. It’s a billboard for the new shipping port set up to challenge Singapore. Any non-Malaysians want to hazard a guess about what it says? Yu tu ken spik Malaysian… [Click the thumbnail for a larger image.]

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You’re currently reading “Hau tu spik Malaysian,” an entry on Bin Gregory Productions

Published:: 05.31.04 / 8pm

Category:: Language

Briefly

Anwar Ibrahim and the Opposition: Malaysian Seeks End to Decades of Firm Rule - a pretty decent roundup of political developments in Malaysia, from the New York Times.

The Spiritual Aspirant: Sidi Khalil Moore will be in Singapore conducting a workshop for The Spiritual Aspirant, to be held 27 June to 5 July. I had the pleasure to hear Sidi Khalil speak in Detroit back in 2002 in conjunction with the US tour of Habib Ali Al-Jifri. I regret I won't be able to make the short trip across the South China Sea to attend, but I recommend it to anyone in the area. The workshop is being sponsored by Simply Islam, under the capable hands of some of the fine people who put on the Journey to Ihsan event a couple years ago, which I did attend and enjoyed immensely.

Collapse Preparedness: The transition from the USSR to the republic of Russia was a catastrophic event for the people who lived through it. The eventual (imminent?) collapse of the US will be much much worse, warns Dmitry Orlov. The USA has a Collapse Gap. Orlov realizes

that some people will react rather badly to having their country compared to the USSR. I would like to assure you that the Soviet people would have reacted similarly, had the United States collapsed first. Feelings aside, here are two 20th century superpowers, who wanted more or less the same things – things like technological progress, economic growth, full employment, and world domination – but they disagreed about the methods. And they obtained similar results – each had a good run, intimidated the whole planet, and kept the other scared. Each eventually went bankrupt.

Valuable lessons on what to expect and how to prepare follow. Read it yourself, but the condensed advice is this: Live on the margins of society. One encouraging sign that Americans are picking up the skills they will need to survive: haggling at the mall.