Volume 2017, Issue 244 - Special Issue: Language Planning and Multilingual Malaysia, Issue Editors: Wang Xiaomei and Minglang Zhou

This article introduces multilingualism in Malaysia and examines how the language management of the multilingual society there is challenged by interactions among global, regional, national, and local language orders. These orders and their interactions give rise to various language ideologies, which are struggling to maintain a hierarchy of their respective choice. From this perspective, this introductory article reviews the seven contributions in this issue and analyzes the impact of conflicting language ideologies on language policies, use, maintenance and development in families and communities in Malaysia. The analysis suggests that in Malaysia global and regional language orders have significantly influenced the national and local language orders while the national order has a relatively weak impact on the local language order. Malaysia’s diverse and sometimes conflicting language ideologies reflect the existing language orders and support them. The combination of the existing language orders and ideologies seems to be a perfect fit for unity in diversity regarding nation-building, but it is not necessarily a fit for diversity in unity in Malaysia. The lesson from the Malaysian experience is that language management and nation-building have to take full consideration of the interaction among global, regional, and national language orders within the communities involved.

This article looks at the language planning that has been carried out since Independence in Malaysia for the promotion of Malay, the national language. After a sociolinguistic outline of the country, the different phases language planning is normally divided into are examined in detail, highlighting both the points that have proven to be successful and those that have not. In the second part of the article the problems that have been encountered during language planning and the reasons why Malay has not succeeded in becoming a full-blown national language which even the non-Malays can identify with are examined. Together with the problems, some possible solutions are put forward that may improve the given situation and make Malay a useful and prestigious language also for the non-Malays, who make up more than one third of the total population, and perhaps even internationally.

The interest in examining the use of English among Malaysian undergraduates arose as a result of much media talk about the poor language skills that these students display upon gaining their first jobs in the work place. This study analyses simulated job interview sessions at a public university involving a group of final year students and a human resource manager. The audio recordings of the interviews were transcribed and analysed to determine the language and strategies used by participants while responding to interview questions. Micro analysis of the interview discourse, and matching it against the macro perspective of the nation’s vision to produce competent users of English for the workforce, revealed that a huge gap exists between the two “worlds”. On the one hand, the university gets students who lack language competency while, on the other, government policy is to have these students trained and ready to communicate effectively at the workplace within a period of three to four years. This is indeed a high call. The data analysed provides a glimpse into the students’ deficiencies. The article proposes that there are more issues that need to be tackled regarding the matter at hand.

Malaysian Mandarin is a unique variation of Mandarin that exhibits certain degrees of variation as opposed to Putonghua, the standardized Mandarin spoken in Mainland China. Following the spread of Putonghua under the Mandarin globalization trend, the issue of language standardization has become a central concern among the Chinese Malaysian community. This article examines the central principles of language standardization and thus gives suggestions to the proper and workable strategies needed for managing the Malaysian Mandarin variations. By these principles, in addition to an analysis of issues within Malaysian Mandarin standardization, this article proposes, through illustration of lexical standardization, a flexible and dynamic approach to setting strategies for standardization of Malaysian Mandarin with regard to the Mandarin globalization trend.

Family domain is crucial for language maintenance. It is also a critical avenue for children’s language acquisition. In Spolsky’s language management theory, family is one of the key domains for language management. In this study, we focus on family language management in Hakka families in Balik Pulau, Penang. Structured-interviews were conducted in November 2012. In total, 14 Hakka families were interviewed. In each family, one parent and one child were interviewed. This article examines family language policy from three perspectives: ideology, practice, and management. The results show that Hakkas in Penang give great importance to Mandarin and almost abandon Hakka in the family domain. However, they still have strong Hakka identity and some parents have restarted to speak Hakka with their children consciously. Multilingual capacity is a common expectation from parents. With multilingual input in the family domain, most of the children become passive bilinguals or multilinguals. The regional prestige dialect Hokkien is part of the repertoire of these Hakka families. However, there are no intentional efforts from the parents to teach Hokkien to their children. Conscious language management is only found for Mandarin and sometimes for English. This results from the parents’ language ideology that Mandarin is the most important language for Chinese Malaysians and English is an international language for their children’s future career. Findings from the current study contribute to the understanding of language maintenance and language shift in general.

Many of the 138 living languages in Malaysia are listed as endangered and some listed as vigorous are undergoing language shift. Most of these languages are shifting towards Malay, the national language, and to English, an international language. Since standard Malay is the language of instruction in the government schools, many indigenous parents are speaking Malay to their children with the hope of giving them a better start in school. People in a number of the indigenous minority groups in Sabah and Sarawak recognize that language shift is occurring and are taking steps to reverse it. In the past 15 years several of the indigenous minority groups have been engaged in language development projects and, as awareness grows, more groups are joining them. They have developed appropriate writing systems and produced linguistic papers to increase understanding of the vocabulary and grammar of their languages. They have also implemented early childhood education programmes with the intention of increasing the number of speakers of the languages, and raising their status. This article presents some of the methods, activities, successes and challenges that these groups have experienced in their language development projects while seeking to revitalize their vulnerable languages.

After a general introduction to the aboriginals of Peninsular Malaysia, the so-called Orang Asli, this article introduces the ethnic group upon which the research focused: the Mah Meri, a Senoi group living in the state of Selangor, not far from Kuala Lumpur. The research is based on a survey on language use and attitudes carried out in four different Mah Meri villages on Carey Island. The results are then analysed in general terms and compared with those provided by similar research carried out among the Bidayuh, a Dayak ethnic group in Borneo, showing a rather high degree of vitality for the Mah Meri language, even though lower than in the case of the Bidayuh. In contrast, when the answers given by the younger speakers of the language are compared with those provided by older speakers, a pattern of slow but steady ongoing language shift clearly emerges. The article closes with some general considerations on the state of linguistic and cultural endangerment Orang Asli are facing, including further comparisons between the results of this research and those of another study conducted in a different Mah Meri village and some suggestions on possible revitalization strategies. The evidence seems to show a relatively high degree of endangerment for the languages spoken by the Orang Asli in general, and for the Mah Meri in particular.

French language teaching (FLT) started in Malaysian boarding schools in the 1970s due to the initiative of a few Malaysian teachers who had acquired some knowledge during colonial times. It was formally implemented by the Malaysian Ministry of Education (MOE) in 1984 and in the 2000s, FLT developed greatly in parallel with the internationalisation of higher education. The country had no former expertise in teaching French on a larger scale and future teachers had to be sent abroad to be trained in French. Thirty years later, this language has not only become part of the linguistic scenery in Malaysian boarding schools, as the MOE has also extended the teaching of French to normal day schools. This article will review the language planning regarding French language teaching in Malaysia as an example of foreign language planning in the country, and will focus on its implementation in the Malaysian secondary schools from the 1970s to 2014. Issues of teaching hours and textbooks will not be dealt with, as these matters are left to the circumspection of the respective schools.