Talk to Me

Every time there's a significant dearth in public issues to harp on, our savvy politicians tend to meander back to the heated issue of language, moaning and crying over the sad erosion of the English language in our country. Nothing like beating a long cremated horse to prove a point especially since hardly anyone would argue over the much-belaboured point that Malaysians seem to have lost their grasp on the language.

Yes. We do speak English over here although some might think otherwise ( those same folks who still think we wear grass skirts, worship stone idols and live on makeshift trees ) :)

Somehow during our first decades of independence in the desperate bid to uphold the sacred sanctity of our national language, we seem to have stubbornly turned our backs on the English language, seemingly the language of the colonialists. Obviously much to our own detriment. Not sure how we slipped from being world renowned for speaking the proper Queen's English ( surely earning the unadulterated praise of a certain Professor Higgins ) to having bumbling airline pilots who find themselves struggling to finish a prepared speech welcoming passengers aboard.

Seems like everyday that I manage to bump into an unlettered bumpkin who can hardly speak a word of English - or even Bahasa Malaysia for that matter - even after obviously suffering a decade of indifferent public schooling in both languages. Even my paltry attempts at trying to draw out something more than a monosyllabic grunt amounts to nothing.

Paul : Why are you here today? Any complaints?
Bumpkin : Uh. Ah.
Paul : Yes?
Bumpkin : Eh.
Paul : Kenapa? Encik boleh cakap dalam bahasa ke?
Bumpkin : Duh.
Paul : Ni hui buhui jiang hua yu?
Bumpkin : Uh.

At this point I'm usually found fuming with my hands bunched up to keep from committing bloody mayhem with my pointed pen. You can't believe how exasperating it is sometimes to find myself confronted with a confusing string of dialects.


Fortunately I didn't have this at hand...
Sad to say, most of the bumpkins above were brought up here in the city so the argument of city versus country education doesn't hold water here. For the sake of Charming Calvin who's probably raising a banner upholding Chinese education right about now, I could hope that they'd be able to carry a decent conversation in Mandarin ( and I'd be able to stumble blindly through along with them ) but it seems that majority seem to have spent their school years peddling pirated DVDs at the pasar malam - and obviously neglecting their more formal studies.

And I haven't even mentioned the so-called nationalistic homeboys who still insist on the superiority of the Malay language - and don't feel the least need to learn about anything outside their closed borders. Have they heard about that frog in a shell?

Don't get me wrong. I don't believe all of us should learn the language if we don't see a need - but after ten years of strict enforced learning in our schools, surely some of us would have picked up a smattering of pidgin English. Even if you spent the time daydreaming staring at the clouds like I did, some elementary knowledge must have at least seeped through that thick skull purely by osmosis. Hell, even my immigrant grandmother who literally stepped off a slowboat from China can understand rudimentary English.

And let's not forget the small but growing number of desperate housewives casually picking up foreign tongues on shockingly non-subtitled dramas on Astro Kirana. With the amount of serials we're bombarded with on a daily basis, don't be surprised to find our kids speaking in Vietnamese and Spanish soon.

At least that's what I thought of the average Malaysian before. Until I sifted through the entire plethora of Malaysian blogs and found that on a whole, we do still have a certain enviable international standard. A couple of blogs I've read so far ( complete with Shakespearean-like poetry! ) could give even a native speaker a run for his/her money so at least it's nice to know we don't all sound like disenfranchised illiterate baboons.

Or at least I hope I don't.

So all hope is not lost for Malaysians yet.