New life for mother-tongues?
Sim Kwang Yang
The debate on the issue of language vis-a-vis our nation’s education policy continues. That could be a good sign; it does indicate that some people are beginning to examine critically some of the most entrenched ideas on the fundamental principles of our social contract.
One consensus that seems to have emerged from this discussion on malaysiakini is that the quality of education offered by our Malaysian national school system is deeply flawed.
Of course Chinese and Indian parents send their children to vernacular schools for other more deeply rooted motives, and not merely because the vernacular schools offer better education. ( I myself have some reservations about the quality of education in the Chinese schools as well, but that is beside the point.) Nevertheless, the philosophy behind formal education within the ambit of officialdom has doubtless outlived its relevance and usefulness, and ought to be overhauled inside out and upside down. We need an education reform now like a man on the desert needs water.
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The debate on the issue of language vis-a-vis our nation’s education policy continues. That could be a good sign; it does indicate that some people are beginning to examine critically some of the most entrenched ideas on the fundamental principles of our social contract.
One consensus that seems to have emerged from this discussion on malaysiakini is that the quality of education offered by our Malaysian national school system is deeply flawed.
Of course Chinese and Indian parents send their children to vernacular schools for other more deeply rooted motives, and not merely because the vernacular schools offer better education. ( I myself have some reservations about the quality of education in the Chinese schools as well, but that is beside the point.) Nevertheless, the philosophy behind formal education within the ambit of officialdom has doubtless outlived its relevance and usefulness, and ought to be overhauled inside out and upside down. We need an education reform now like a man on the desert needs water.
Meanwhile, the cabinet has made tentative announcement to review the use of English in the teaching of science and mathematics. If indeed Malaysians ought to be more literate and fluent in the English language for utilitarian reasons, teaching the language in maths and science is hardly the most effective way to go about it. But that policy descended upon the Malaysian population from atop Mount Olympia, at a time when a different deity was occupying Zeus’s throne. Only now, do politicians and bureaucrats have to live with the aftermath of such hasty switch of policy.
Even there though, we witness the violent clash of purely nationalist impulse with pragmatic economic needs with regard to the question of our national language. English rules the increasingly globalised world, and even such an arch nationalist as our former PM was compelled by the forces of reality at work to bend to the imperative of economic-cum-linguistic imperialism of a late-capitalist world.
In this vein, a recent news item stands out like a sore thumb, as a lingering testimony to this conflict between the anachronistic aspiration of orthodox nationalism, and the hegemonic tendency of globalisation to homogenise the world’s population in all aspects of their lives, including and especially langauge.
Real or imaginary threat?
Just last week, Education Minister Hishammuddin Tun Hussein urged government language and research agencies to work hard together, to prevent the extinction of Bahasa Malaysia in the globalised world. If Bahasa Malaysia is the soul of the Malay people, the extinction of the national language would undoubtedly toll the death knell of the Malay race.
It is a politician’s tool of the trade to appeal to his constituents’ sense of crisis, to rouse them from their complacency in the face of impending danger, and to goad them into concerted action against an external threat. The continuing impetus behind the Chinese education movement has always been the clarion call for selfless dedication to the cause of preserving mother-tongue education, to save the Chineseness of the Chinese from obliteration. The hard part sometimes is to determine whether the external threat so posited is real or imaginary.
Given the present circumstances, I doubt very much that the Malay tongue will ever go extinct. The premier dominant political position it enjoys in Malaysia and Indonesia is a reassuring factor. Apart from many other reasons, the sheer number of native Malay speakers in the Malay Archipelagos will continue to give life to their indigenous tongue for a long time to come. One could however, raise the question of the relationship between the actual mother-tongues spoken by the myriad people of Malay stock and the national official languages of Malaysia and Indonesia. But that is another thorny issue best reserved for another day.
On the other hand, judging by the experience of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and all over the world for that matter, the possibility of extinction of the Chinese tongue from the lips of the descendants of the original immigrants from Mainland China has been a historical fact. Cultural and linguistic assimilation of the Chinese into the indigenous landscape has rather been the norm rather than the exception. Whether assimilation is good for the host-nation or their citizens of Chinese descent is quite another matter.
It is this very fear of total assimilation, among many other historical and economic reasons, that has compelled Malaysian Chinese to defend their Chinese education with both tenacity and guile. Outside of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Malaysia is the only country in the world where there is a near complete education system right up to the tertiary level using Mandarin as the main medium of instruction.
My prognosis is that, given the high vigilance, relative posterity and the political will of the Chinese, Chinese education will continue to sustain its present course in Malaysia, although the pathway forward would be very much like the long track behind full of tension and challenges.
An endangered language
Does it mean that the threat posed by globalisation to the languages of the world is not real? Not at all.
According to ethnologists and linguists, the number of natural languages in the world now is about 6,800, give or take 500, depending how you define a language. Nearly 500 are facing immediate extinction, many of them in Asia. No language in Malaysia has been listed as severely threatened. According to some prophets of doom, 90% of existing languages will go extinct within the century.
When is a language considered endangered? Some experts cite a critical mass: when the number of speakers dip below 6,000, their tongue may disappear in the near future. That would put the Penans of Sarawak in a precarious position, since they total population numbers less than 10,000 today.
Why do languages die off? Well, among many factors at work, one reason often cited is the imposition of a national language among a polyglot population. When more and more young people switch to the dominant language for the sake of financial and social advantages, and elder native speakers die off without passing on their mother tongue, the language runs the risk of disappearing in due course.
Why should anyone care whether his, or any other, language will die off or not?
Well, there is always the identification of one’s self-identity with the language with which one speaks. At the dimension of nation-formation, when ethnic or racial sentiments made that quantum leap into political expression, language has always been the focal point for mass mobilisation. By no means the sole symbol of nationalism, language is nevertheless the most popular vehicle for the transmission of a collective destiny, which individual members share by virtue of their collective self-definition.
This is of course happening in Malaysia, and hence, the current hysteria with language and education.
Certainly, this concern with the survival of languages has its historical legitimacy, although I would argue that this legitimacy is contingent upon certain historical conditions, limited to a certain period in time.
My problem with this view is not only with the difficulty of dealing with national languages as a historical phenomenon, but also with the hazy and yet-to-to clarified concept of identity and self-identity. To talk about a process of collective self-definition is to deal with a messy contradiction, even though in the lives of most people, this concept is more or less taken as self-evident truth.
Birth of a language
There are many other ways of thinking about language though.
For a start, we know that the ability to think and speak a language is the distinctive defining feature of our humanity. We will never know how languages were born. If it is to be thought of as an invention, then it is a far greater invention than the fire or the wheel, or the computer. For with the birth of language, humanness was also invented.
In short, language can neither be considered as a mere tool for communication, nor as an apotheosised entity holding the soul of a nation together and guarded by patriotism acting as a kind of ersatz religion.
In short, we understand and think in terms of language; we make sense of our world and its worldhood only through language. Without language, there is no ‘world’, and there is no ’self’. There would be no ‘God’ without it.
Language any language is an an entire universe unto itself. Again, we will never know how languages were born. But in so far as we can imagine languages being born naturally through the eons, this birth of cultural universes is nothing short of a mysterious miracle; perhaps you could compare it to an earthly imitation of God’s divine act of creating this material universe out of nothing, if you have the religious frame of mind.
We may not know how languages originated, but we do know roughly how they will die. To watch our mother-tongue and the mother-tongues of other people die, and do nothing about it, is to commit a moral crime against humanity.
After national languages and nationalism, there must be new life for all other tongues, especially those of our neighbours.
