How to kill off Sarawakian languages

Pak Bui

A friend’s fourteen year old daughter, Hui, a slightly chubby teenager with a pretty smile, became tired and listless. She was admitted to a public hospital, and she underwent various tests that showed she had cancer.

A senior female doctor in her forties came to see Hui to break the news. I was there at the time. The doctor spoke to Hui in Malay. The girl had been educated in a Chinese school and understood next to nothing.

“Are you a Malaysian?” the doctor asked in Malay, in a slightly aggrieved tone, like a teacher demanding an answer from an obstinate child.

The girl was quiet, and looked down.

“If you’re Malaysian, why don’t you speak Malay?”

Hui remained silent.

“Don’t you know that now, all the nurses you see around you speak Malay?” the doctor went on, gesturing at the nurses next to her. “And one day all the doctors will speak only Malay?”

Most pitfalls in medicine, law, education or business can be overcome if communication is clear. In any decent health care system, a translator would be provided for a patient with any kind of language barrier.

It hardly needs saying that the entire Malayan government service is not a decent one, not even a mediocre one. It is decrepit, and populated with brainwashed and unthinking zombies.

A former economic advisor to the Penang government told me recently, “There are two main groups of people you have to deal with, if you want to improve governance: politicians and civil servants. The civil servants are just not up to the job. They are generally the worst of the worst. The ones with ability are in the private sector or abroad. Things were different in our parents’ generation, when people with talent wanted to join the civil service. But even so, as long as you speak Malay to them, you can still push some reforms through.

“The main problem is the politicians. They are the real obstacles.”

Poisoning languages

Umno politicians are, indeed, the main obstacles to cultural diversity. Umno politicians impose linguistic domination on our many different ethnic groups: 31 in Sarawak and 35 in Sabah and numerous other groups in peninsular Malaysia.

Languages are the primary cultural glue holding a particular ethnic group or nation together. Stalin, Hitler and Lee Kuan Yew all tried to suppress the diversity of languages in order to forge a more uniform national identity.

In Sarawak, ethnic groups like the Iban have seen their language weakened by the lack of formal education in their own language. Sim Kwang Yang, MP for Bandar Kuching in the 1980s and 90s, fought for the introduction of Iban and other Dayak mother tongues in the school curriculum. In the end, Iban was introduced as a subject, but inadequate resources, and too few teachers dedicated to teaching in Iban, ensured this project remained stillborn.

Yet the Iban language will continue to survive for many years, if only because we have nearly a million native speakers in Sarawak, not counting the Chinese and other ethnic groups who chat fluently in Iban.

Smaller Sarawakian ethnic groups, like the 15,000 Penan, have a more difficult time. Young Penan boarders in Bario, for example, are encouraged to speak only Malay when they are at school, far from their families. I have heard these schoolboys and schoolgirls swear in Malay, and play loud Malay pop and rock music, with typically empty and stupid lyrics, when they return to their home villages.

A language dies when the number of people speaking it declines below a ‘critical mass’, usually 100,000. The extinction of any language is accelerated by migration and mixed marriages. These are growing more common in Sarawak, where the young are leaving the longhouses, and drifting to the urban areas. The rural-urban migration accelerates the death of diverse mother tongues.

The deprivation in rural areas, including the theft of Native Customary Rights land and forests, is caused by corrupt politicians. These are in turn supported by Umno. So Umno politicians are impoverishing linguistic diversity on two fronts: in formal education and the civil service, as well as in economic terms.

Death of a language

Zubaidi Abbas, state director of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) in Sabah, announced results of a DBP survey in Sabah that showed many languages are facing extinction.

“Our initial study showed that there was indeed a valid concern as far as extinction of ethnic dialects in Sabah is concerned. This is because the younger generation below the age of 30 tends to be more comfortable speaking in Bahasa Melayu rather than in their respective ethnic languages,” he reported.

He added that “the use of (the) mother tongue as their language of communication is on the decline.”

The DBP survey interviewed 3,978 respondents in Kampung Andang Layang Laut, Kudat, home to some 35 dialects and sub-dialects. The study found that less than half the people interviewed (47.5%) were more fluent in their mother tongue than Bahasa Melayu.

“The irony is, the survival of some of the ‘bahasa sukuan’ is now under the threat of extinction. It will be very difficult to trace the language if that happens,” he said, referring to the DBP’s ongoing ‘Jejak Etnik’ efforts to trace these different dialects and sub-dialects.

The real irony is that the Umno politicians are behind DBP, as well as the relentless drive to reduce ethnic diversity. Umno behaves this way simply in order to exploit race, religion and language to stay in power. And Umno is supported by Sarawak’s Barisan Nasional.

Killing off languages may not make headlines like killing off people, but I would argue it shares many of the motives behind ethnic cleansing.