HAVING collected your friend from KL or dropped off your favourite cousin at the Kuching International Airport, you couldn’t have missed. If you missed the green light and had to wait for the signal to proceed before turning right or left, you would have seen a huge billboard proclaiming October as Bulan Bahasa Kebangsaan. Those coming from Serian could have seen the writing from the left corner of the eye. Whichever angle you viewed it from, the message was clear. There was an appeal for several months to remind Malaysians after 48 years of Merdeka to use their own national language.
The advertisement has disappeared!
However, it doesn’t mean that from October we should stop speaking in English or any other language including your own mother tongue. Use it besides your own mother tongue. I think that’s the intention behind the advertisement. During that month, special activities – discussion forums, debates, cultural shows, etc — should be organised in order to motivate people to use the vocabulary, especially new additions or borrowed terms or words.
Malaysians should have a good command of at least two languages; one used at home
and the other for reading books and newspapers as well as following news from the TV and the radio.
Bahasa Malaysia is supposed to act as a unifying factor for people with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds into a strong nation, the object of our sole loyalty.
Importance of mother tongue
Many of us take knowledge of language for granted — we think we know a lot about our own language. At the Iban Forum held in Kuching last weekend, we were told by the paper presenters that many Iban children, especially those in the cities, do not speak or write in Iban. Good thing the language is being taught in secondary schools. In schools
in the Serian district, more Bidayuh students are learning the Iban language than the Sea Dayaks themselves, so I have been told.
At the forum, there was a considerable interest in the study of the Romanised Iban Language as well as in the existence of a written language using the Dunging Alphabet. That’s a good sign and it is hoped that that interest can be sustained for a long time.
The importance of the mother tongue has been recognised by those who have forgotten it through neglect or by force of circumstances. Many Chinese in Thailand and Indonesia or the Philippines cannot speak or write Chinese. A casual acquaintance at a reception last Tuesday was telling me that from his great-grandfather down to his generation, which is the fifth, Hokkien has almost disappeared, Mandarin none at all. Feeling somewhat guilty, he has sent one of his children to a local vernacular school.
Why study another language?
The teaching and the learning of any language is meant for the preservation of culture and identity of each ethnic group. But that of the national language is for the purpose of identifying the citizens with their nation and if this is accepted can be a unifying factor in nation building. In our case, we have chosen Bahasa Melayu, being the root language upon which our National Language is based. Malay is a beautiful language, easy to learn but hard to master. Fear not, Bahasa is here, to stay
Recently there has been talk among certain quarters that the government is paying more attention to the study of English at the expense of the national language. I don’t think so. The Pak Lah government’s assurance that the continuing use of English in schools was not a policy ‘reversal’. The national language has not been neglected at all. Fear not. If anybody has new statistics, let him produce the latest. My information is out of date. A few years ago the Minister of Education said that some 10,000 new theorems in Mathematics had been created; one million articles had appeared in specialised journals every two years since 1990 and a number of management books had been published. There must be many more of these by now.
Importance of English
But the importance of English to Malaysia cannot be overstressed. Like Bahasa Malaysia, the richness and vigour of English vocabulary arise directly from its ability to absorb words from places far beyond the shores of England. Some people call it a piratical language because of its long history of plundering other tongues and making off with Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, French, Italian and Asian words.
What began as the language of a group of wandering Germanic tribes – later calling themselves Anglo-Saxons – has become an international language of science, technology, trade
and diplomacy for some 700 million people around the
world. And it’s growing by the day. Chinese and Japanese are learning English like nobody’s business.
It would therefore be a pity, if not a loss of opportunity, if Malaysians did not take
advantage of this trend in the fast developing countries.
Precious legacy of Mission schools
Malaysians are lucky in this respect. Your ancestors may be from Penang or Melaka or Singapore or Brunei or North Borneo or in any of the Federated and the Un-Federated states of Malaya. They were fortunate people who had the fortune to go to Mission schools; inadvertently, in the course of time, had picked up some alien cultural traits, such as wearing woollen clothing in the middle of a humid and sticky afternoon. But they did not become total Westerners. Some became more English than the Englishmen, that’s true. They started eating bread and used spoons and forks. They read books on Arithmetic, Algebra, Biology, Chemistry (incidentally, these are Arabic derivatives); they read Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, etc. Similarly, many Malaysians in Arabic schools are influenced by Arabic culture; some dress up and talk more like the Arabs than the Arabs themselves. This is a trait derived from learning another culture.
British legacy
If there is one useful legacy that the British Imperialists have left behind, it is their language, apart from the civil service and the parliamentary democracy, to name a couple.
In Sarawak, we have been learning those subjects in the same language. And our forefathers had somewhat influenced us in our way of thinking after over 100 years of exposure to the lingo. Thanks to all the Mission schools in Sarawak, we have inherited a valuable asset. It would therefore be daft of us not to continue learning the language while we master the national language and learn other ethnic languages as well. The more the merrier. When Malaysia was formed, the name of the language was being popularised as the Bahasa Kebangsaan as it should but later it was called Bahasa Melayu. Perhaps, the ‘change’ has left a number of people confused and they began to question the necessity of the change of name.
There is no change; it has always been Bahasa Melayu or Malay all along; it has been accepted as the national language. However, in the 1990s several Malay friends reasoned that it was time to call a spade a spade. They said that if British citizens accept the Englishman’s language, there should not be any problem for non-Malays to accept Bahasa Melayu as the language of all Malaysians. I don’t think there’s a problem there.
To me a language is a means of communication and if it is useful, I use it, never mind what kind of spade it is as along as it can cangkul (move the earth). The national tongue, if properly nurtured and accepted as the national tongue that is able to bind the people, can even move mountains.
Kubu Kapit tiangnya condong Ditiup angin dari Pelagus
Laksana pipit termakan jagong Padi jangan dibuang terus.