Cultural Concepts and Loanword Choices in Malaysian English

In the multicultural and multilingual situation of Malaysia, Malays, Chinese, Tamils and a number of smaller groups live together, partly in their own cultural environment, but also in close interaction. This creates a multilingual environment which leads to multiple linguistic interferences at the level of spoken varieties, called “bahasa rojak” (‘language mix’) by the speakers. This mixing of linguistic resources follows cultural concepts and ascriptions specific to one of the three main languages. While the spoken vernaculars are lexically influenced by the standard languages, the standard varieties gain localized colloquial, semi-creolized registers: Malaysian English, Malaysian Chinese, Bahasa Pasar. In order to assess the regularities of this multilingual competence, speakers of Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese were interviewed in Kuala Lumpur and Penang in various languages, observing borrowing and code-switching as well as syntactic patterns. An elicitation task was performed in order to compare loanword use and structural analogies across all languages. This study aims to shed light on possible cultural differences and the motivations for lexical and grammatical convergences. The particularly complex situation may simplify with the youngest generation (<20) who do no longer actively use the South Sinitic family languages and may not attempt to learn other Sinitic vernaculars, but will continue to use the localized Malaysian varieties of English and Chinese as well as the spoken form of Malay while also getting educated in the respective standard varieties which are also omnipresent in mass media and the internet.