ℹ️ Now, a caveat before I go on. There’s a common narrative on left-leaning US-dominated social media that there’s a concerted effort by Beijing to stamp out native languages. This interpretation is false and propaganda, and this writer is not in the mood to educate or argue with these believers right now, and as I don’t want this thread to be hijacked by an agenda, I’ll be moderating the comments.

This will be my only attempt at educating people on the subject: Even in Malaysia, Chinese dialects are fading, being replaced by Mandarin. There’s no concerted effort by the Malaysian government to stamp out Chinese dialects. This is all due to the power of peer and family pressure. Self-inflicted, almost. Kids feel pressured to adopt the perceived “elite language” at school or even at home. And if parents do not make a concerted effort to educate their children in the native tongue, it’ll fade.

It happened in my family, with my siblings being total bananas, preferring to communicate most of the time in English while I am can converse in Hokkien (a Chinese language dominant in China’s Fujian province) and Mandarin. This was a choice on my part to keep learning Mandarin and speaking in Hokkien. My siblings just didn’t think it a priority, that’s all. It’s no biggie. It’s just a personal choice every individual in Malaysia may make. Now on to the essay.

Yaqi Li’s essay, Reversed Tones and Borrowed Tongues fascinated me because, as a Malaysian, I grew up in an environment where we end up using multiple languages.

I thought long and hard about whether I was ever ashamed speaking Hokkien, and the short answer is, No.

In fact, I’d be surprised if any Malaysian-Chinese would feel ashamed speaking their native tongue. For as long as I lived, the Malaysian Chinese community had been fiercely determined to preserve their traditions, and that included speaking their native tongues. If anything, they’d frown at anyone who look down on their mother tongue.

The pressure and “shame” I feel is that I was never fast or smart enough to master more languages. For example, having lived in Kuala Lumpur for most of my life, I am often side-eyed for not bothering to learn Cantonese.

Malaysia’s unique education system—we have schools whose primary languages are either English (private schools), Malay (national schools), Chinese or Indian (vernacular schools)—meant that there’s no one Malaysian with the same command of language in any language.

My strongest language is English despite being in a Malay-dominated national school because my family are Penang Peranakans who are Anglophiles. Even before Malaysia’s independence, the Penang Peranakans spoke English and sent our kids to missionary schools.

At home, my parents and I speak a mixture of English and Hokkien. Among my siblings, I’m the most fluent in Hokkien and Mandarin. Mandarin was a ‘chance of geography’. I grew up in Johor, but unlike my siblings, I just naturally learned Mandarin while they didn’t.

The Peranakans are Chinese, but we don’t really feel inferior or ashamed for not speaking Mandarin or our native mother tongue because it’s understood that most of us can’t. The Malacca Peranakans, for example, mostly speak Malay.

One of the excuses I give when a Chinese-educated Malaysian-Chinese scoff at me for not speaking Mandarin fluently is that I am Peranakan. A look of understanding will dawn on their faces and they will say, “Oh no wonder.”

They’re not as forgiving for complete Chinese bananas, however. They just cannot comprehend Chinese people who do not bother preserving their mother tongues.

We also don’t feel any shame/superiority/inferiority for learning a language. When you are a Peranakan, whose culture is a blend of myriad cultures including Chinese, Malay, Thai and even British, there’s really little shame in learning a language. As I said, if anything, our shame comes from not learning more languages than we should!

I’m an odd duck in that I have really good accents in my languages (great Malay and Mandarin accents) but my vocabulary sucks. My accent makes up for it, fooling many native speakers into thinking I’m native like them.

So, in summary, Malaysians generally don’t really have an identity crisis over our mastery of language. However, language is politicized, with Malay trying to maintain its primacy in an English-dominated world, made even more complicated by a language-fractured education system and a population whose mastery of Malay isn’t standard or homogeneous.

But I hear that among the Chinese educated, they do feel bad if they can’t master English. But again, only because they are supposed to. They understand how important it is to master English and their mastery of it will determine their success in business.

But again, when most of Malaysian society is multilingual, able to switch to multiple languages (sometimes in one sentence), the shame comes from not mastering a language fast enough or adding more languages to your skillset.

#languages #Chinese #Culture #Mandarin #Hokkien #Malaysia