Tom Pepinsky

Category: Malaysia

  • The Proposal to Make Malay an Official ASEAN Language is not Crazy

    Last week the Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob remarked that Malay has the potential to be an official language of Southeast Asia. This feels like a rather surreal moment in Malaysian politics, at least according to most of the popular media coverage I’ve seen. Like of course that’s not going to happen, right?

    I don’t think the idea of Malay as a working language for ASEAN is unrealistic. In fact, it would be entirely reasonable for ASEAN to designate one of the languages of Southeast Asia as an official or working language. And if you had to pick only one language from the ASEAN member states, it would definitely be Malay.

    But of course there would have to be a lot of interesting details to work out. So here’s how to think about what’s going on in Ismail Sabri’s comments.

    The first thing to note is that Ismail Sabri distinguishes explicitly between Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Melayu. The former is “the Malaysian language,” in the sense of the language of the state of Malaysia. The latter is “the Malay language,” which refers to a family of loosely related and mostly mutually intelligible dialects, many of which are creoles with various levels of official standardization and recognition. The generic term Bahasa Melayu would include the official languages of the states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, the Indonesian regional languages of Jambi and Riau, various dialects of Malay spoken in peninsular Malaysia, and the Middle Indonesians of Jakarta, Medan, Makassar, Manado, Kupang, Ambon, and other cities. One often hears “Malay” used to describe the official language of Malaysia, but Ismail Sabri means Malay in the expansive, second sense.

    This means that Ismail is talking about the first language of hundreds of millions of people across at least seven countries. It is the majority language in Indonesia and Malaysia and Brunei, it is the national language in Singapore, it is a working language in Timor-Leste (a future ASEAN member), and it is a minority language in southern Thailand and the Philippines. No other single language is so important for so many countries in ASEAN; it’s not even close. It would be much more jarring to make such a case for Thai, Vietnamese, or Tagalog as a working language for ASEAN.

    Second, Ismail Sabri’s comments don’t seem to be saying that Malay would be the only official or working language aside from English. It seems reasonable to say that Malay might be one of many, just like German and French are the work languages of the European Union in addition to English.

    Third, the idea that there should be no other official languages for ASEAN besides English is a little colonial. It favors Singapore, and secondarily Malaysia and the Philippines. (This paragraph has levels of meaning that you may excavate at your leisure.)

    The argument against adopting Malay as an official language of ASEAN is that ASEAN is not yet at the stage where difficult, internally-focused conversations are feasible. That is, making the first language of the largest linguistic group the official language requires a level of social trust and long-term institutional commitment that ASEAN member states do not have.

    Put it this way: under what conditions would Vietnam agree to Malay as a working language for ASEAN? Only if it thought that there was a future in which either (1) Vietnamese were afforded such status in exchange or (2) it thought that ASEAN was so dependent on its relations with the Malay-speaking world, and Vietnam so dependent on ASEAN, that this was in Vietnam’s long-term interest.

    One might think about this with reference to Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia, two standardized and official versions of Malay. Malay was a first language of a small minority of Indonesians at independence, although it was spoken as a second language by a larger minority (mostly in urban areas). Making Malay the official language of Indonesia proved to be unifying specifically because it did not favor any of the larger ethnic groups in Indonesia. In Malaysia, where Malay was the first language of a numerical majority of Malaysians at independence, making it the official language has proven divisive for the country’s linguistic minorities. Making Malay the lingua franca of ASEAN would probably be more divisive than unifying among ASEAN members. English, for better or for worse, isn’t so divisive.

    Of course, there is also the question of which Malay. The national languages of Malaysia and Indonesia are close enough that one can understand both with some work,* but they are not identical and differences of meaning can sometimes emerge.** But the Middle Indonesians and Malay dialects of peninsular Malaysia can be highly divergent from those national standards: I suspect that a speaker of Kupang Malay would not be able to converse easily with a speaker of Kelantan Malay. Making Malay the lingua franca of ASEAN would mean developing a generic version of Malay which is probably not any of the standardized forms that currently exist.

    And finally, if we’re going to talk about the political implications of making Malay a working language of ASEAN, we might also pause to consider the politics of Ismail Sabri’s own remarks. He was making them at a symposium on the Malay language being held by Malaysia’s own national language council, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.*** I view Ismail Sabri’s comments as directed internally towards Malaysians, encouraging them to use Malay in Malaysia as the default working language in business, tech, and education. Such an argument wouldn’t be needed for any other national language in Southeast Asia, which is, itself, an interesting observation.

    NOTES

    * I tend to think that the difference between Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia as roughly equivalent to standard American English and Scots. If you speak one you can understand most of the other but you might prefer the subtitles when watching a TV show. It might be easier for non-native speakers like me to switch between them.

    ** Best example is kenyang, which means “full” or “stuffed” in Standard Indonesian, but in Bali Malay means something closer to “tumescent.” Cf. “fanny.”

    *** Official motto: Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa [= Language is the Soul of the Nation]. (Not ethnic group: nation.)

  • Malaysian Politics Regresses to the Mean

    The past week in Malaysian politics has been nothing less than a whirlwind. It started with news that Azmin Ali had hatched a plot to unseat Malaysia’s 94 year old Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad. It ended with Muhyiddin Yassin being sworn in by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong as Prime Minister. Along the way a lot has happened: the ruling Pakatan Harapan coalition fractured, a bunch of Malay politicians jumped parties, Mahathir resigned and was appointed his own interim successor, and so much more.

    Having tried to follow all of these events that happen overnight (from the East Coast, USA perspective), I confess to playing catchup. For example, my comments for the South China Morning Post and Asia Times were out of date almost as soon as they were published. And yet the main takeaway point to understand what has happened to Malaysia doesn’t require much attention to the nitty gritty details.

    What has happened, in short, is that the pan-ethnic coalition that push the ruling Barisan Nasional [= National Front] regime out of power in 2018 has fractured. What has replaced it is the hard core of the parties that represent a Malay-first agenda: the long-time Malay nationalist party the United Malays National Organisation, the Islamist Pan-Malaysian Islamist Party, and the upstart UMNO-splinter party the Malaysian United Indigenous Party. Known as the Perikatan Nasional [= National Alliance], this coalition is the inevitable product of Malaysia’s long-running ethnic cleavage which—after fifty years—has finally seen UMNO and PAS join together in a government that no longer has even token representation of non-Malay interests (which the Barisan Nasional always maintained). Opposing Perikatan (for the moment) are parties that tend to represent non-ethnic platforms, parties from East Malaysia, and those who reject the Malay nationalist agenda more broadly.

    It is striking that Muhyiddin’s government freezes both Mahathir and Anwar—the two most important Malaysian politicians over the past half century—out of power. That said, it is only a day old so far, and the smart money is that Mahathir and Anwar are not down for the count. And elections will be due in any case in a little over three years at the longest; I had previously thought that snap elections might be on their way, but now I am not so sure that Perikatan can be confident that it would win an electoral mandate. So there is bound to be plenty to follow in the coming days. More party hopping, bluffs, and backroom deals are on their way.

    But none of these details will change the basic essence of what has happened, which Malaysian politics has regressed to the mean.