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Speaking in tongues
Recently, Sam has written "Francophones vs. francophones", and Tara has expressed her views on promoting French online. Whilst I don't speak French (much) or write in it (at all), the discussions about pushing the Web presence of languages other than English, or of how québécois differs to French deeply interest me, for numerous reasons. If you have known me for a while, you would know that I am a non-native English speaker. I don't know which is my mother tongue (or my mother dialect, to be precise), because I grew up amongst a chorus of Chinese dialects; I learned English from perhaps the age of five, and Malay (Bahasa Malaysia) at school when I was six or seven years old. I had a preference for English because I valued its efficiency and its rich vocabulary at a young age, and therefore I excelled at it relative to the other languages I was exposed to. In hindsight, the level of language taught at school was very, very poor. And in hindsight, I wished that I pushed the boundaries of getting better acquainted with my ancestral tongue. In any case, I was more interested in music, science and mathematics to have really paid attention to languages. My most interesting experience from a linguistical point of view was when I moved from Malaysia to Australia at the age of thirteen. My written English level was correct to the letter and to the comma, but I could not speak. It was not because I was not able to speak English — the real shock for me was to speak English exclusively. As Tara has said, she would begin a sentence in English and finish it French, or vice-versa. I had four or five Chinese dialects at my disposal, phrases in colloquial English, and of course, Malay. My true native tongue was a palette of colours — I picked and chose whichever word was most appropriate for the sentiment, or for my purpose of expression. It wasn't very long ago that I remarked to Karl, who has been learning Mandarin: "I don't know how to swear in Mandarin. I don't know how to say anything rude in Mandarin. Anything rude or negative that we had to say, we expressed in Hokkien." At that, I said something quite terrible — in Hokkien — just to prove the point. Languages are always in the process of dying or evolving. To me, it is folly to believe that any language can remain pure or absolute. And yet at the same time, the death of a language takes with it a disappearance of a culture, amalgamations which ultimately limit the diversity in the way we communicate and the way we think. Let's take the particular case of Bahasa Malaysia Baku (formal Malay, as opposed to street Malay). I remember Malay as a young language — "proper" pronunciations and grammatical rules were still being defined and clarified when I was at school. Teachers had to pass certain exams in order to teach in Malay - most teachers, like my mother, had to learn the language. It is a language which has phonetically incorporated many English words in the area of science. The historical reasons for education in Malay resulted in a very big change which has caused problems, such as the drop in English proficiency in several generations of Malaysians, combined with the lack of material in Malay at higher education levels — especially in science and technology. It could be seen as a socially expensive experiment to see if a language could survive at keeping abreast with current technological developments. Whilst English is not the world's most spoken language, for now it makes up about a third of the Web. I am guessing this will gradually change to reflect the true distribution of languages in the world. If I could write fluently enough in other languages that I know, saya tetap menulis dalam bahasa-bahasa tersebut. Who knows, 可 能 明 天 会 更 好. Posted by sniffles at March 04, 2003 09:50 PM