According to the Constitution of Malaysia, Malay acts as the country’s national language while every person is allowed to learn, teach, and use any other language. Out of the population of 32 million people... [ view full abstract ]
According to the Constitution of Malaysia, Malay acts as the country’s national language while every person is allowed to learn, teach, and use any other language. Out of the population of 32 million people (Department of Statistics Malaysia, 2017), Chinese is the second largest ethnic group. In the Chinese-medium schools, Mandarin Chinese is used as the medium of instruction at the primary level but at the secondary level, the medium was changed to Malay from 1977, after the implementation of the 1961 Education Act. Nevertheless, Mandarin Chinese is still retained as a language subject. This situation has caused a decline in the usage of Chinese community languages in many private and public spaces, leading to language shift. This shift has disrupted the patterns of Chinese community language use in many Malaysian-Chinese families and raises questions about their survival in the Malaysian society.
In search of answers, this study applies a case study approach within a qualitative paradigm to investigate the relationship between national language policy and the situation of the Chinese community languages in Penang. Penang serves as a research site due to its long history as a Chinese settlement that provides Penang with its special cultural character. Employing Haugen's (1972) notion of language ecology to analyse the data, which comprised of semistructured interviews, the findings demonstrate that different agencies from macro to micro levels have made a great deal of effort to maintain the Chinese community languages in Penang. This investigation from a top-down and bottom-up perspective contributes to the understanding of the language maintenance issue in a multilingual setting, particularly in Penang, which has not been previously addressed in the literature.
Reference
Haugen, E. (1972). The Ecology of Language. In E. Haugen (Ed.), The Ecology of Language. Essays by Einar Haugen (Selected and Introduced by Anwar S. Dil) (pp. 325-339). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Current Population Estimates, Malaysia, 2016-2017. (2017). Malaysian Department of Statistics.
National Education Acts (1961).
The Constitution of Malaysia, Article 152 (2010).
