To know Malay is to love Malay – with persuasion FMTNews
Putting aside concerns about the deteriorating standards of English, something so critical for our overall economic success, let’s focus on what we can do to help Malay become the dominant language in Malaysia.
English itself is an amalgam of many languages. Having started out as a Germanic language, it went on to absorb a lot of words from Latin, Greek, Spanish and other languages too, including French. This is why it’s so important for Malaysians to be multilingual. Otherwise, the population will just adopt and bastardise other languages, currently English but it could easily be Mandarin or Korean, creating an unholy linguistic monster down the road.
It must start by seeing the Malay language as a great product that it must convince people to “buy”. It must understand there’s competition, some of which are “better” in terms of history, utility etc, especially English and increasingly, Mandarin. By letting free enterprise and competition come into play, the chances of success would be much higher. After all, what do we have to lose?Enough with using politics to force people to do what you have elsewhere conditioned their mind to dislike. Stop thinking about creating a bureaucracy that will run wild, much like the French, who invented the term in the first place.
Malay must be branded properly. We are not a global language. We’re not even a regional language – the Indonesians have a better claim to that. Let’s call it instead what we want it to be – the language of Malaysians, or Bahasa Malaysia.Calling it Bahasa Melayu was a misguided political attempt to assert superiority when we should be striving instead to build something up rather than crowing about silly political victories.
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