English No Longer The Language Of The Colonizer

 English No Longer The Language Of The Colonizer

M. Bakri Musa

 

When Hong Kong reverted to China in 1997, that effectively ended Britain as a colonial power. Effectively because she still has nominal sovereignty over its so-called 14 Overseas Territories, mostly in the Caribbean. When Bermuda, off the coast of North Carolina, held an independent referendum in 1995, over 75 percent of the voters rejected it. That was significant and may seem perverse as the majority were descendants of slaves brought in by earlier British colonizers. The descendants of those slaves were wise in refusing to be chained by history.

 

            Meanwhile back in mother Britain, she had seen pendatangs (non-natives) becoming Prime Minister, Chief Executive of Scotland, and Mayor of London.

 

            English as a language by contrast is on a very different trajectory. Even in China, a super power and with Mandarin already a major language, there are over 400 million English language learners and a million teachers of that language. Even though the 2024 Nobel Laureate in Literature Han Kang writes in her native Korean, she is fluent in English. There are no fewer than half a dozen non-native English-speaking Nobel Prize winners in Literature writing in English. Rabindranath Tagore, an Indian, was the first (1913), followed by Wole Soyinka, Nigerian (1986), Kazuo Ishiguro, Japanese (2017), and Abdulrazak Gurnah, East African of Arab descent, (2021). 

 

English is now the language of aviation, diplomacy, business, and most important, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). It is also the dominant language in cyberspace. 

 

Today the most advantaged intellectually, economically, and in so many other ways are those who are proficient in more than one language, with English being one of them. The most disadvantaged are those who are monolingual, and their language is other than English. Most Malays belong to this latter category.

 

I posit that the successes of earlier pendatangs were not due to their mysterious oriental cultural values or genetic make-up as per Mahathir’s half-baked theories, rather that they were bilingual, many trilingual; likewise, their current descendants. With enlightened educational policies Malays too could be trilingual, with Malay, English, and (most likely) Arabic. The old apek would not have been successful peddling his wares in the kampung if all he could speak was Hokkien.

 

More recent pendatangs from Bangladesh have discovered this wisdom too. They go beyond, to marry locals. They cannot do that if all they can speak is their native language.

 

The current relative backwardness of Malays in our Tanah Melayu vis a vis non-Malays is that we are handicapped by being monolingual. Perversely, Malay leaders would like their followers to remain that way in their misguided notion of language nationalism. That is also pure parochialism as well as misplaced cultural pride. It is blatant hypocrisy that those Malay leaders who dismiss the importance of English are themselves educated in English, many in England. 

 

Prime exhibit was the late Tun Razak. As Minister of Education in the 1950s he exhorted Malay parents to send their children to Malay schools while surreptitiously sending his (all five) to English schools, and in Britain to boot. Hypocrisy aside, there is the matter of how he could afford that on his modest ministerial ringgit-based salary. Just a thought; I wonder where his son Najib Razak learned the idea that the loot heobtained from 1MDB was but a generous gift. Current Malay leaders are no different. Their blatant double standard escapes them and their followers. 

 

That queen of Malay language, Nik Safiah Ismail, asserted that Malays need at most only five percent of us to be proficient in English. The rest could rely on translations. This is Tanah Melayu (land of the Malays), she reminded us, and often. Left unsaid is that her children and grandchildren would be in that select small group. 

 

Many Malay leaders, even urbane sophisticated ones who should know better, share Nik Safiah’s language parochialism. Hypocrisy would be a more accurate term to describe their stand. Or a condescending feudal mentality. We are leaders; we need to know English. The rest of you peasants need not.

 

The few who recognize the importance of English are denigrated as petualang bangsa (national obstructionists), just a step before pengkhianat bangsa (traitor). Then these leaders bewail why we are still behind despite the ever-generous largesse of affirmative action. 

 

Although my parents were ardent admirers of the late Tun, my siblings and I are forever grateful that they had sacrificed a lot to send us all to English-medium schools in town, even though that put a severe strain on their modest income. Being Malay school teachers, that also took a lot of courage to buck the national trend. 

 

We have advanced far beyond the old simplistic Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, that is, our language influences how we view and think about the cosmos. Insights on modern neuroscience have shown the many significant cognitive and other advantages of being multilingual, quite apart from the obvious competitive edge in the marketplace. And the earlier we acquire this ability, the better.

 

Learning English is not an expression of nostalgia for the old colonial ways or of good old ye England. Rather, it is a pragmatic and necessary modern-day reality. Leaders who ignore this are unnecessarily handicapping their people.