Just chill, la! A Malaysian guide to speaking English
Re: “A few tips on getting kids to speak English”, Have Your Say, yesterday.
After all these years of exchanging barbs here, especially with Somsak Pola, it is heart-warming and refreshing to read something from Vint Chavala that is not politics-related.
Coming from Thailand’s southerly neighbour, I was exposed to a multitude of languages and dialects at a young age. In Malaysia, it is not unusual to find an ethnic Indian speaking Hokkien or Cantonese dialect splattered with some Malay plus some English slang in the mix. The downside is, everyone is a Jack-of-all-languages but master of none.
While the official language is Bahasa Malaysia, the commercial sector still uses English as the main medium of communication. One may argue that this is a remnant of the British colonial rule that ought to be eradicated since we are now an independent country. But English serves us well in international commerce, so it’s unlikely to be changed anytime soon.
Personally, I feel the key difference between Thais and Malaysians when it comes to using languages is that we Malaysians tend to be “thick-faced”. We are less likely to feel discouraged when laughed at, especially speaking in broken accentuated “Manglish”. Who cares as long as our business counterparts hand over their money to us.
One can keep one’s cultural identity intact when learning a new language without compromising our core values and mother tongue.
Jeff Chong
Bangkok
Pity poor democracy, kidnapped
and tortured by Little Englanders
Re: The Brexit debate on this page.
I, for one, would not be at all surprised if readers are fed up with a beast that has been prodded, poked and carved to the point of near exhaustion. Now, if we are to believe the anti-democracy rabble, “democracy” (when it suits – such ironic hypocrisy) has not only been done but seen to be done, and now these nostalgic xenophobes, the Little Englander populists, are baying for a final outcome. Yet again, they upchuck the usual hysterical memes about the “will of the people” and “manifest destiny” that are despoiling the political landscape.
Indeed, within these pages the readership has had its collective intelligence profoundly insulted by transparent extremism coyly pretending to be small “c” conservatism, in order to dignify the pernicious twin evils of nostalgic xenophobia and hyper-nationalism.
What we can say with a fair degree of certainty, however, is that the capering Brexiteers have sold their fantasy on a patently false prospectus, a dewy-eyed vision of an Albion not so much perfidious but rather a fictitious noble and self-sufficient entity that can flip the bone at collective strength.
As an abject lesson in geo-political naivety, or on the obverse, rude cynicism, this takes some beating.
At the front of this mob we have the foam-flecked and lupine Nigel Fromage, he of the cheesy grin, a swilling chancer tapping into the fear of those afraid of a mutably changing world and feeling powerless to do anything about it.
We could describe this entire act of Machiavellian subterfuge as directed misanthropy. One thing we may be sure of: it won’t be the likes of Fromage, the ghastly Jacob Rees-Mogg and company who will have to suffer the costs of a catastrophic future.
Dr Frank
Bangkok
