20 Lubna Alsagoff
This pragmatic and economically driven attitude towards English in
Singapore clearly constructs it in terms of its value as an international
language, and thus sees no part in Singlish, even though it has come to be
the home language of half of the school-going population (Alsagoff 2012),
becoming a marker of Singaporean identity, especially when it becomes a
stumbling block for international commerce.
MALAYSIA
Malaysia, which comprises peninsular West Malaysia and East Malaysia,
made up of the states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo, is
a country much larger than Singapore with a population of 30 million.
Demographically, Malaysia is very similar to Singapore, with its population
comprising primarily of Malays (about 60 per cent), Chinese (about 25 per
cent), and Indians (about 7 per cent). With the colonization of Malaysia
by the British, English was introduced, and soon grew into prominence,
with the Roman script even being added to the Jawi script for the written
form of Malay. The arrival of the British also heralded large numbers of
Chinese and Indian immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century who
sought work in the thriving new economy. These immigrants specialized
in specific industries, giving rise to a clear pattern in the geographical
spread of the different ethnic groups — the Malays concentrated in the
rural areas focusing on agriculture, the Chinese focused on tin mining
with many also running businesses in the urban areas, and the Indians
working in the rubber estates and railways as labourers (Azirah 2009).
When Malaysia gained its independence from the British in 1957,
it faced similar problems as Singapore. As a highly diverse multiethnic
and multilingual country where an estimated eighty languages were
spoken, Malaysia needed to be able to develop language policies that
would allow it to manage this diversity. One key difference between
Singapore and Malaysia, however, lay in the fact that, in Malaysia, the
Malays were the dominant ethnic group comprising over half of the total
population. In addition, their status as the indigenous race — as the
bumiputra or “sons of the soil” — gave them clear symbolic and political
power over the Chinese and Indians who were of immigrant ancestry.
And it also allowed the Malays to claim their language, notably named
Bahasa Melayu (literally, the language of the Malays), as the language
of the nation.