28 Lubna Alsagoff
policies completed the argument, in a sense, of this link between language
and identity. But as would be expected, when policies take into account
identity and the rights that people have to be educated in the language
of their cultural groups, language planning becomes messy and far
more organic in nature. Thus, in the advent of the Asian economic crisis,
Malaysia began to realize the unemployability of its Malay youth because
they lacked competency in English, which precipitated a change in policy
where English was again “let in” as a medium of instruction for science
and technology, only to be “banned” from such classrooms barely a decade
later from what was essentially nationalistic pressure to uphold the status
of the national language.
Malaysia’s linguistic history certainly demonstrates this messiness,
especially when it stands in contrast to the neat reductionist approach
taken in Singapore. Facilitated by an instrumental view of language
(Wee 2003), Singapore has effectively argued for the place of languages
in relation to a rubric based on economic and social value. The discourse
around language planning focused much less on what rights people had
to speak or use their own languages. For the government, the important
issue facing the nation at the time of independence was its economic
survival. For this, the government saw English as the most expedient
and most logical means of obtaining access to Western markets, although,
clearly, racial harmony was as essential in ensuring that the nation could
progress without obstacles. Thus, as a counterpoint, the government’s
recognition of three languages as mother tongues, representative of each
ethnic group — Mandarin for all of the Chinese, Malay for the Malays,
and Tamil for all of the Indian community — as the cultural ballasts that
allowed Singaporeans to remain rooted in their culture. Wee (2003) in fact
intimates that this relation of language to culture is highly formulaic and
does not represent reality, given that the mother tongue languages are in
fact post-hoc constructions to justify the neat classification of the ethnic
groups, with an increasing number of Singaporeans more comfortable in
English than their assigned mother tongues.
Although economic concerns were also relevant in the Malaysian
context, they did not appear to be the drive for the Malaysian government;
unlike Singapore which clearly privileged discussions of economic survival
in its decision to give English such a central role, the Malaysian government
put far more focus on the way language rights were managed and were
circumspect about the value of English in nation-building. However, as