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Language has always been an important marker of ethnic identity. The cultural legacies of many peoples are rooted in creation myths written in their ancestral tongues, such as the Theogony of the Ancient Greeks and the Kamiumi in the case of the Japanese. These fables grant legitimacy, splendour, and a sense of unity to the people concerned. However, such powerful means can fail to have the same effect in a multiethnic and multilingual community, instead potentially being a barrier to social cohesion. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Malaysia, where the adoption of Malay as the national language has been a focal point of ethnic division. Even in recent years, we have seen frequent squabbling over who should use which language in what situation, decades after the enshrinement of Article 152. In her book, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia, Rachel Leow argues that such conflicts arise from the “disconnect between a monoglot state and its polyglot subjects.” 

This monoglot ideology has been used time and again as a political tool to divide the different ethnic groups in Malaysia. Those who cannot speak fluent Malay are often targets of ridicule or political smearing. The familiar injunction is that “Malaysians should speak Malay,” a statement that rejects the identity of many Malaysians who do not primarily speak Malay. Those who do not conform to this ideal are accused of being unpatriotic or disloyal to the state. Aside from the palpable racial chauvinism of that statement, it draws attention to the degree of language disconnect facing Malaysia. 

Language disconnect is both a symptom and itself the cause of ethnic insularity. On one hand, language barriers can make it difficult for a primarily Malay-speaking person to form close relationships with someone who exclusively speaks Mandarin. Coupled with the fact that people of different races tend to go to different schools (for instance, due to the existence of Malay-only boarding schools), the social groups of many Malaysians tend to be racially homogeneous. This, in turn, exacerbates the problem, as a homogeneous social circle provides little motivation for some to learn another language and branch out. It is not then surprising that racial issues still run amok when many lack the perspective of those from different races.

Elsewhere, other multiethnic countries have taken different approaches. Indonesia, home to over 1,300 ethnic groups, adopted a standardised form of Malay as its official language, dubbed Bahasa Indonesia. The reason why Malay was chosen instead of Javanese, the language of the largest ethnic group in the country, is of particular interest. University of Indonesia Cultural School linguistics professor Mohammad Umar Muslim states that if Javanese was chosen, “it might have triggered social jealousy because of the higher visibility of the Javanese people.” On the other hand, Malay had been the lingua franca of commerce across Indonesia, yet the Malay ethnic group was a minority group in the country. In summary, Indonesia chose to adopt as its national language one that was already widespread among its people but was not associated with a majority race.

Another relevant case is that of Singapore, which has an ethnic makeup similar to that of Malaysia. The city-state recognises Malay, English, Mandarin, and Tamil as their official languages, with English as the de facto lingua franca. However, the average Singaporean does not only speak English. They speak a specific form of it called Singlish, a creole language that developed through prolonged language contact between the indigenous languages of the island. Interestingly, a study showed Singaporean youths hail Singlish as a unifying identity marker. In fact, a great number of university students agreed with the statement “I think speaking Singlish is a critical part of my self-definition.” The study also provided evidence that young Singaporeans strongly disagreed with the belief that Singlish is “bad English.” 

Synthesizing the above two approaches yields an interesting prototypical idea. As in Indonesia, there is already a common language spoken by Malaysians that is not associated with any particular race: English. But more than that, much like Singlish, many Malaysians speak Manglish, an English-based creole developed from decades of intermixing between Malay, English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Cantonese. Unlike its parent languages, Manglish itself is a language born of the multiculturalism of Malaysia. It lends its cultural legacy not to any one race, but to the entirety of the Malaysian people. Consequently, this approach would be immune to the criticism of elevating any one race in Malaysia.

However, some may not see the creole as a language in its own right, instead referring to it merely as “Bahasa Rojak.” Such a rigid definition of language is a product of linguistic prescriptivism, which is a practice that prescribes the “correctness” of a language via “explicit rules that are externally imposed on the users of that language.” One must realise that such a viewpoint is arbitrary; language is continually changing and cannot be “corrected.” A creole like Manglish can be considered a language like any other, with its own distinct grammar and lexicon. Indeed, some creoles have been standardised and made official languages, as in the case of the Tok Pisin creole in Papua New Guinea.  Therefore, the revamping of Malaysian society might require that we change our view of what constitutes a language.

The well-known Malay adage “bahasa jiwa bangsa” might not suffice in our rapidly changing world. It is time we question which and how many languages constitute the soul of the nation, if at all. In doing so, we cannot be cowed by those who assert that the institution of Malay as the national language is set in stone. Such rhetoric only serves to divide us. For too long the state has sought to convince us that we are too different from each other. But in the words of Marjane Satrapi, “The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”