Malay/Indonesian for an Official Language of the East Asian Community

Written by Yoon Hwan SHIN

"To recognize Malay as an official working language will contribute to narrowing and closing political, economic, and cultural gaps and discrepancies that stand in the way of integrating Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia."

Recommendations

1. ASEAN+3 or the East Asian Summit should, in due time, declare the Malay/Indonesian -- Malay hereafter -- language to be an official working language of the East Asian Community.

2. In order that Malay is ready to serve the purpose when EAC comes into realization, academic and intellectual communities of ASEAN+3 should assume an active and leading role in studying and promoting the language to become a regional language.

3. Southeast Asian countries, particularly those three -- four with Singapore included -- Malay-speaking counties, should take the initiative to conduct in-depth research on the various regional variants and local dialects of the Malay language and to formulate a standard Malay.

4. Northeast Asian countries should realize that the success of this project will depend on wholehearted support from Northeast Asians and should make every effort to popularize Malay in their society.

Shortcomings of English as Official Language of East Asia

5. Foreign to most East Asians, the English language cannot signify East Asian cultures and symbolize East Asian unity and identity. It would be self-abnegating if East Asian Community (EAC) adopts or allows English to serve as its only official language. Any East Asian language would perform the task better than English, as that should represent at least a part of East Asian cultures and is related to other East Asian languages.

6. English could be one of the two – possibly more – official East Asian languages including Malay but should not be the only one. ASEAN+3’s or EAC’s official languages could consist of from only one to many. Even all the national languages of member countries could be validated as the official languages of EAC as is the case of the European Union. This multi-lingual policy would have symbolic meanings for the unity of East Asia but would not be helpful to create and promote a strong East Asian identity and cohesiveness. The Chinese language – Mandarin or Putonghua – can also be a candidate for an official language. When it comes to the working language, however, only Malay and English will qualify for the status.

7. Constructing EAC should be grounded in civil societies and among peoples, not merely in states or among elites. Communications even among leaders and elites are difficult in East Asia when they rely on English. Then it would be almost impossible and take infinite time for ordinary East Asians to reach at the stage of being mutually intelligible and communicable if we continue to let English be the only working language.

8. English learning is agonizing and costly to East Asians as their cultures and languages are hardly related to the Western, and particularly Anglo-American, civilizations. Imagine how much money and energy East Asians have been spending and how long a time they have been wasting in order to learn this frustrating foreign language.

9. English is a very difficult language to learn by any standard. With complicated grammars, eccentric spelling, and wide-open usages, the language is much more difficult to learn compared even to such internationalized European languages as French, German, and Spanish.

10. Artificial languages including Esperanto, which has been promoted to replace English as international language, are also out of the question, as any such languages are fully laden with Western values, ideas, and cultures. For instance, more than 70 percent of Esperanto words have their roots in the Western languages.

11. We should support and learn from the historic decision on July 6-8, 2004 of the African Union to adopt Swahili as an official language of the organization. It should be noted that Swahili is spoken by a smaller number and percentage of people than is Malay.
Merits of Malay

12. Among thousands of languages and dozens of national languages found today in Asia, the Malay language stands out with easiness to learn, richness in vocabulary, and equality of speakers. It also has the largest numbers of speakers in Southeast Asia and, in East Asia, the second largest next only to Chinese.

13. Malay is one of the easiest languages, if not the easiest one, for foreigners to learn among important languages spoken in today’s world. After only a few months of studying and learning, they could survive among natives. Those Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans who can speak Malay tend to quickly switch to Malay from English when he or she realizes the other party understands the language.

14. Throughout its life, Malay has been enriched by the introduction of all major civilizations with new words and expressions full of knowledge, wisdom, and beauty. Indian, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, and English loanwords abound in contemporary Malay and Indonesian. The language will continue to adapt itself to the development of science and technology.

15. Malay is a language of equality. Unlike Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, Malay has only one speech level regardless of class, political status, seniority, and sex. The speech style is uniform between man and woman.

16. Unlike English and other Western languages, Malay has developed and served as a language of more peace and harmony than war and conflict, of more exchange and cooperation than imperialism and exploitation, and of more multicultural coexistence than domination and hegemony.

17. A proposal of Malay for an official language for ASEAN+3 or EAC could receive the least objection and even a unanimous support from East Asian countries. Within the confines of ASEAN, however, Malay and Indonesian speakers constitute so overwhelming a majority that such a proposal could be feared and opposed by other countries. Now that the region is enlarging to include Northeast Asia, Malay as an official language could play a balancing role vis-à-vis Northeast Asia and China to a certain extent.

18. Chinese, with two-thirds of the East Asian population speaking and its magnificent ideographic characters, deserves consideration to become an official language. It would be politically acceptable, however, only after Malay has been recognized as an official language. For Chinese alone would not be able to overcome at least two obstacles in the way of being crowned as the official language of EAC: difficulty of learning and fear of Chinese dominance. Even if Malay and Chinese are adopted together as official languages, only Malay will be able to function as working language due to its easiness in contrast to the difficulty of Chinese.
Simplicity of Grammar, Usage, and Style

19. With simple grammars and effortless pronunciations, it is easy to learn. Esperanto claims to be “four times” easier than ordinary languages, but Malay is ‘many times’ easier than even Esperanto.

20. Unlike English, Malay words are read as spelled or spelled as read.

21. Unlike languages of Mainland Southeast Asia and Chinese, Malay does not have tones. It is not a tonic language. Unlike English, stress on syllables is not distinct or not important.

22. Unlike most languages, Malay verbs never change in the ending according to tense and subject. Changes between transitive and intransitive verbs are simple and consistent.

23. Malay nouns do not have irregular forms of plurals. The plural of any noun can be made by repeating the word twice. Pluralistic forms of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs add poetic, emphatic, or colorful meanings to original words.

24. The order of sentence in Malay is less fixed than flexible, with the subject and the predicate changeable and phrases moveable to any location. It tends to put a key word or phrase on the front of a sentence. However, formal or written Malay has strict rules and grammars to make communication unmistakable.

25. In spoken Malay, a complete sentence is an exception rather than a rule.History and Language Map of Malay

26. Malay had long served as a regional language, a lingua franca among traders from all over Southeast Asia in the early Modern era.

According to A. Reid (1988: 7), “It was possible for Magellan’s Sumatran slave to be immediately understood when he spoke to the people of the Central Philippines in 1521, and almost two centuries later for Dampier’s Englishmen to learn Malay in Mindanao and use it again at Poulo Condore, off southern Vietnam.”

27. The competence of Malay as an official language for a newborn nation has been fully evinced in the four ASEAN countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei Darussalam, where Indonesian or Bahasa Melayu as a version or variant of Malay was sanctioned as the national language, and in the Democratic Republic of East Timor, where Indonesian was recognized as a working language. Note that Indonesia, Singapore, and East Timor all have a small minority of native Malay speakers; Javanese, Chinese, and Tetum speakers are predominant.

28. The success story of Indonesia is especially instructive, and Indonesia’s adoption after independence of Malay into the national language Bahasa Indonesia has rapidly expanded its speakers from a few million to over 200 million within a time span of 60 years. Prior to that time, Malay had been nothing but a minority language that originated in Riau islands and coastal areas of the Indonesian Archipelago. Government policy alone could not have disseminated Bahasa so quickly and so nationwide; the inherent merit, easiness, of the language has also been a crucial factor behind its success. By comparison, the fate of English in the Philippines and, to a lesser degree, Singapore, is not so sure as Bahasa in Indonesia.

29. All put together, Malay was being spoken by at most 10 million when WWII was over, while the number has grown to be now estimated at almost 300 million. It has been one of the most rapidly spreading languages in the world since World War II. Malay has now the fourth largest numbers of speakers after Chinese, English, and Hindi/Urdu.

30. A number of ethnic and minority groups speaking Malay-related languages are found in non-Malay-speaking Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Philippines, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The Mon-Khmer and Vietnamese languages themselves are somehow related to the Austronesian group of languages where Malay belongs to. These language systems would facilitate Malay to become a popular foreign language in Southeast Asian countries within a short period of time.

31. Over ten thousand overseas and ethnic Chinese have taken root or reside in Malay-speaking countries. They have developed their own version of Malay called Chinese Malay or Baba Malay. Now there are also found tens of thousands of Japanese and Koreans as sojourners. These groups of East Asians could play a bridging role in transmitting and disseminating Malay to Northeast Asia.

32. A large number of Arab and Indian descendents, immigrants, and business people have long frequented and lived in Malaysia and Indonesia. The two countries have a larger Muslim population than West Asia (Middle East). Malaysian and Indonesian cultures have been heavily influenced by Indian and Arab worlds. Such contacts and traditions would help Malay to move beyond East Asia to the whole Asia to become a truly Asian language – and even a global language in the future.
Prospects

33. To have one or more East Asian official languages will contribute greatly to creating and promoting a strong East Asian identity and, eventually, constructing an East Asian Community.

34. To recognize Malay as an official working language will contribute to narrowing and closing political, economic, and cultural gaps and discrepancies that stand in the way of integrating Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia.

Yoon Hwan, SHIN is a professor at the political sience department of Sogang University. This article was written on Jan.30, 2005. From ARENA official website.