Realities of Bahasa Melayu and English
This is the writer’s candid and deeply personal reflection on Malaysia’s multilingual education system — and the unintended consequences it has had on generational knowledge, identity, and opportunity. Tracing one family’s journey through English, Mandarin, and Bahasa Melayu schooling, the writer offers sharp insights into language policy, national pride, and global pragmatism.
My late father was an idealist. Back in the 1960s, my eldest brother was schooled in a Mandarin primary school, my second sister in English, my third in Mandarin and me, the fourth, in English, and my fifth in Mandarin. He had hoped that his children would be sharing more among ourselves given the difference in the school systems. By the time my sixth sister was to attend school, English primary schools were abolished. So, my father opted to send all his remaining four children to Mandarin primary schools.
I was among the last cohorts of English medium school students. My high school mates included those who came from the Bahasa Melayu (BM), Mandarin, Tamil streams who had to spent a year in Remove before joining the English schools.
After my HSC, I was admitted to UKM, which adopts BM as the only medium of instruction. In my first year in college, my ethnic Malay coursemates from the English medium would speak English with me, but as the years went by, they resorted to speaking only BM just like those from the BM medium secondary schools. Automatically so, since BM was the only language of our lectures and our tutorials in UKM. Ironically, the reference books, journals and periodicals in the library were mostly English ones. A few in BM, and some old ones in Indonesian (where jarum was spelt djarum, and Selasa was spelt Thalatha), a language that is quite different from our BM. Surprisingly though, many coursemates with a weak command of English who relied heavily on lecture notes and tutorials still made the mark, enough to graduate.
I remember during my final year, a fresh undergraduate of Chinese ethnicity spoke Mandarin with me during orientation week. Although I had mastered my mother tongue on my own, enough to be able to read Chinese text and speak Mandarin, I continued speaking English with him, only to get a response that he did not speak English. Shocked, I told him that we would speak BM then. And we did, much as he did not like the idea. All the same, he graduated without fully understanding the English reference material at the library.
I had the opportunity to attend a forum at Dewan Bahasa & Pustaka back then, during which I asked the Dewan why were the BM translations of reference material not forthcoming fast enough. They said it was not commercially viable to do so. Firstly, with a small Malaysian population, and just a handful of local universities, we simply do not have enough critical mass to create a market for those translated reference books. Few university students buy books, anyway. Secondly, it takes time to translate a book, and by the time the BM edition is ready for release, a newer revised English edition has already hit the stores. I am not sure whether 30 years down the road since then, how much translated material we have in our public university libraries today, factoring in the two reasons given by DBP then.
We always say we are surprised by the English language skills of our graduates. How about their knowledge of their field of major? How much of the English reference material are they able to comprehend in order to complete their assignments and pass their exams?
I had the opportunity to serve in Indonesia for two years in the mid 1990s. I found that local Indonesian graduates did not speak English too, but they were probably more knowledgeable than some of our fellow Malaysians because they have a lot more academic and reference books translated into the Indonesian language. They have at least a market big enough for such translated works, even though newer revised editions in the original English language are simultaneously competing for attention. While in Jakarta, I also noticed that advertisements in the Jakarta Post for English tutors would generally specify that a North American native tongue is preferred. With the amount of American television programmes available, that was a logical preference. Never mind the fact that they were once a Dutch colony and many among the older generation still held dearly onto the Dutch language. The reality of today’s world is, English is the way to go.
When I was hiring management trainees from Chengdu, China in 2001/2002 for the company I was working with in Hong Kong, few of the fresh graduates spoke English. And shyly, too. Two years later, when recruiting the same in Xi’an, the scenario had changed. Many more fresh graduates had mastered the English language, speaking out confidently that it would give them an edge to compete in the real world. By 2009, my training manager, a local graduate from Chongqing in his early 30s, spoke English so well it would put many local Malaysian graduates of his age to shame. That is reality.
As a Malaysian, we should be proud of our national language and be able to speak it well. If we want to advance as a nation, we too have to be pragmatic. Much as we want to position BM on the world stage, we must face the reality before us. Who are the people beyond our shores who would want to read or speak in our BM? By the same token, if our graduates are only competent in BM, their worldview is very likely confined to that of Malaysia.
So, did you wonder why my father sent all his remaining four children to Mandarin primary schools? It’s too late for you to ask him now, but I can tell you. He had hoped his next generation will have a broader worldview, given the easy access to Chinese language reading material from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, rather than live the life of a frog under the coconut shell due to a lack of English language skills. The old man was never formally educated himself, but he was wise. That’s reality.
(Note: Three days after the above article was published in The Malaysian Insider, an entire paragraph was plagiarized by someone who had his writings published in The Star, June 05, 2013. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, is plagiarizing the highest form?)
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/sideviews/article/realities-of-bahasa-melayu-and-english-h.-lee/
Note: Malaysian Insider is now defunct.
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