NST Leader: The battle for English and Bahasa Melayu in Malaysia

MALAYSIANS are combative when it comes to their position on the use of the English language.

Some groups are battling for the increased use of English. Others insist that the use of English must be scaled down to elevate Bahasa Melayu (BM) in every sphere of governance, education and commerce.

Then there are those who assert that Mathematics and Science must be taught in the colonial tongue. The there’s the people interspersing English and BM in the same sentence.

This is the rough-and-tumble English-BM landscape confronting Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim after he implored the Education Ministry to improve English proficiency in schools.

Anwar contended that English is “too critical and important”, even as BM is promoted as the national language. The PM’s concern is Malaysians’ poor proficiency in English, which is the global language of technology, commerce and diplomacy.

The Education Ministry’s task will be complex and confounding because Malaysians have blended English and BM into a cocktail of linguistic horrors to practitioners of the King’s English and BM.

Instructive words like rampaian, kehandalan, kekecewaan, maklumat, keluarga have to compete for usage with antologi, osom (awesome), frust (frustrated), informasi and famili, respectively.

What about the loads of English nouns that were co-opted on a bout of transformation (transformasi?) into official-sounding BM words?

Let’s face it: Malaysians are besotted with English (and American) pop culture to the point of adopting the accent, slang and quirks but not vocabulary, grammar and elegance.

Their “Manglish” is a hodgepodge of below average BM and bare English, with words or phrases extracted from lyrics and TV and movie dialogues of various Western selebriti.

Meaningful Malay words have been irreparably substituted by unnecessary English loan words throughout the decades.

Neglected is BM’s native lexicon, rich in cultural and linguistic heritage, but now hounded by English equivalents. This is the confusing state of English, and with it, the mindless chipping away of BM.

The solution is unavoidable: the whole government machinery must boost the parallel objectives of purifying BM and boosting good English.

If the government fails, a bizarre scenario might emerge in the future: to learn English, Malaysians need only to learn BM because by then, the two languages would have been truly fused.

© New Straits Times Press (M) Bhd

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