[Malaysia] A Pill Too Hard To Swallow

Sin Chew Jit Pao, 06 June 2005

A Pill Too Hard To Swallow

One of the biggest stresses globalisation gives to the world in the new millennium, is the rise and fall of languages and civilisations. This crisis is particularly acute in countries heavily dependent on economic powers for their mere survival, such as Malaysia.

In order to align oneself with the developed West, English has become an important tool. Despite the fact that Malaysia used to be an English colony, its English standard today remains much to be desired, at least "poor English" has been cited as one of the major reasons business bosses have turned down so many job-seeking fresh graduates.

Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines have perhaps the highest standards of English anywhere in Asia Pacific. Hong Kong and Singapore are tiny islands with hardly any cultural burden. Prior to its reversion to the Chinese rule, Hong Kong was administered by the British, and her people, even unwilling to learn English, could hardly be bothered about picking up Mandarin. Instead, they had made the predominant culture from
neighbouring Guangdong province their cultural inclination.

Psychologically, Hong Kongers had relatively insignificant cultural obligation. If they wanted to learn English, they could always do so, hardly feeling the so-called language "invasiveness." Moreover, there were a lot of practical benefits which they could gain for learning this language, and there was completely no cause for repulsion.

Having mastered English, the Hong Kongers continued to speak their native Cantonese in the liveliest possible fashion, even scourging their influences over much of the continent through the territory's flourishing entertainment business to, at a twist of fate, influence the way the dialect should be spoken in Guangdong. The absurdity and senselessness typical of Stephen Chau's movie lingo have to a certain extent dictated the trend of the development of the Cantonese dialect.

What really made the Hong Kongers feel the invasiveness of a language, was the infiltration of Mandarin after the territory's reversion to Chinese rule. Hong Kongers were subsequently compelled to learn Mandarin, or Putonghua, although they have made only limited progress due to their unwillingness and antipathy.

As for Singapore, thanks to Lee Kuan Yew's erstwhile linguo-cultural policies, the city-state successfully moulded a citizenry largely subscribing to the concept that language was appended to economic progress, and gradually shedding most of its own historical and cultural burdens. If not because the sleepy giant which was China now stands up and
stretches its body, Singapore could not even have thought hard to organise some kind of campaign to resuscitate the Chinese language in the tiny republic; hopefully with a little help from the Chinese language acting as a sucking disc, the city-state can attach itself securely on that oversized economic behemoth.

In this respect, the various peoples of Malaysia, owing to sentimental recalcitrance, have been engaging in a tug-of-war for so many decades. The more the government plays up the importance of the national language, the more do Chinese Malaysians feel the need to safeguard their mother tongue.

A blessing or otherwise, language has always been considered within the context of cultural education, with hardly anyone thinking of associating it with economic advancement. Undeniably, that could have explained the high level of purity of the country's Chinese language education, and the pre-eminent standard in Chinese language anywhere outside Greater China.

But with the advent of the new millennium, the tide of globalisation is too hard to resist and avert. If the country's language and education policies remain bonded in the racist suspicion of yesteryear, they will hardly offer any help to the country's future development.

The highly controversial 2-4-3 solution still has to be carried on owing to some kind of reasons, but in the end, this generation of innocent school children will be victimised.

And at such an instant, the government sets the issue aside, turning its focus instead to the decision of teaching Mandarin and Tamil in national primary schools. This, while appearing to be a welcome news for Chinese education in this country, is of limited practical use, given its "technical training for a second language education" approach, which will most likely produce a new generation of Malaysians with only skin-deep knowledge of the Chinese language.

But whatever the medicine in the government's bottle is, it is predicted to, somehow, get arrested at the narrow bottleneck--a pill too hard to swallow, and too hard to be thrown out.

We have no idea when the government will lay down its prejudices to decisively operate on the country's many malignancies.