Bazaar Malay

All you have to do is be observant and alert, and wherever you are, some of the littlest things will tell epic tales.

It was just a coffeeshop like any other in Singapore, and I was picking at my yongtaufoo when I overheard the Chinese hawker wife say to the Indian (or Bangladeshi) cleaner, "Now I show you, we keep over there. Next time you know." Keep what? That's not important, probably some brooms or brushes. What caught my attention was that the hawker wife spoke in English. That was not the first time I noticed that, of course. Gradually, it has become quite common in the last few years, but by the time scale of epic tales, that's been merely yesterday.

The Great Language Shift of Singapore has been an on-going story for the last 50 years, twice as long as half of Singaporeans have lived. I bet most of them do not even know they are living in one of the most unique places on Earth on account of this event. The media in Singapore seldom comment on it, because language (together with race and religion) is still an extremely sensitive issue in Singapore. Furthermore, no matter how Singaporeans may try to be unemotional about it, our neighbours may feel differently, and so this is a subject best left unmentioned, at least unmentioned in the mass-circulation or broadcast media.

But it is an important story nonetheless. It tells us how Singapore is Singapore -- but I am jumping too far ahead in saying that.

Singapore is an immigrant society. Most of us can trace our roots here only two or three generations back, some even less, for Singapore continues to accept newly naturalised citizens. In addition, about one in 6 persons living here isn't even a Singaporean at all. This has been the pattern since 1819 when modern Singapore was founded; only the sources of migration have changed from time to time.

Prior to the 1960's, Singapore society was a patchwork of ethnic and linguistic communities. Even the Chinese were split into six or seven languages -- what today we call dialect groups (and in this shift of terminology, from 'Chinese languages' to 'Chinese dialects' lies another tale). From the Malay archipelago, there came the Peninsular Malays, the Javanese, Boyanese, Bugis and Achehnese. From the Subcontinent, there were the Tamils, the Gujeratis, Punjabis and Malayalees. And don't forget, we had the Ceylonese, the Malaccan Peranakans and Eurasians.

What a Babel this place was! How did these little communities speak to each other? There was no common rule. Even among the Chinese, there was no easy way to communicate between dialect groups. Quite often they just spoke in their own dialect, knowing no other, and hoped that the other party understood. And if he didn't? Then shout louder!

From around the 1930's, Mandarin Chinese began its ascendency, spurred on by a new pride in a revolutionary, communist China. Chinese schools that used to teach in dialect, began to teach in Mandarin and this generation of Chinese school students would influence Singapore politics for the rest of their lives. Yet Mandarin was always confined to the ethnic Chinese, and was never feasible for communication with other ethnic groups.

Within the higher social classes, they used English among themselves, having been educated in English-language schools, but they were a thin upper veneer over Singapore society.

Down in the streets, in the markets and coffeeshops, the inter-ethnic language was Bazaar Malay, even though Malays were always a smallish minority in Singapore. In fact, if one excluded the Javanese, Bugis, and so on, who didn't consider themselves Malay till after 1960, the Malays probably never made up more than 10% of Singapore inhabitants.

But, north of Singapore, in Peninsular Malaysia, which used to be called Malaya, the Malays were more numerous, making up over half the population. The Chinese and Indian communities there quite clearly needed some smattering of Malay to go about their daily lives, and since the various communities in Singapore were closely connected with their counterparts in Malaya, with a lot of movement between, the use of Malay spread into Singapore as well.

In any case, Malay had two eminent qualifications for a link language. It is relatively simple in grammar, and quite undemanding in pronunciation. Malay belongs to the Malay-Polynesian family of languages. It is characterised by a high ratio of vowels to consonants, and the vowels it uses are relatively simple and pure vowels. It also has a limited set of consonants, easy to mimic.

This is unlike the Chinese languages, with their tones (by the way, different Chinese dialects/languages use slightly different tone systems -- did you know that?), their complex diphthongs, and the fine distinctions between different degrees of the "ch" and "sh" sounds.

The Indian languages are also difficult for others. Tamil is devilishly rapid, and the North Indian languages use too much of the throat, something quite foreign to the Southern Chinese and Malay speakers.

In terms of grammar, Malay is rather simple too. It is quite straightforward indicating the tenses, and the direction of action. However, proper Malay uses a lot of prefixes and suffixes to modify the words, which would be beyond anyone using it as a market language. All these complications were then left by the wayside, and the form of Malay that was used as a link language was really a kind of pidgin, called Bazaar Malay.

It was a pidgin because the Chinese tended to use Malay words within a Chinese grammar and sentence structure. I suppose the Indians' use of Bazaar Malay mirrored that too. But somehow, keeping to simple structures and a small vocabulary, they understood each other.

In 1959 the Singapore government was astute enough to make Malay the 'National Language' of Singapore, to blunt the very common accusations of Singapore as a Third China, a kind of spearhead for the long-term Chinese take-over of South East Asia. Those were the days when South East Asian countries were newly independent, and very defensive about their national pride (then again, aren't they still?), and China was aggressively communist, with its Great Leap Forward and Maoist Cultural Revolution.

Malay was taught in all schools as a compulsory third language for a while, but by around 1970 as the political scene settled down a bit, it was dropped. Meanwhile, English was gaining strength, having become the compulsory second language in all schools, unless it was already the first language of the school. By the 1970's enrollment in English-stream schools exceeded enrollment in 'vernacular' schools. Parents increasingly felt that their children would be disadvantaged if they didn't get an English-stream education. The 'vernacular' schools saw their enrollment fall so quickly in the 1980's that they became unviable -- or so the government said -- and all schools then switched to English as the main language of instruction. (It also had to do with the closing of Nanyang University, though that is another long story. However, by closing the only tertiary institution offering Chinese language courses, it choked off opportunities for further education for the Chinese-stream students. Solution? Eliminate the Chinese stream altogether.)

Whether Chinese-stream or English-stream, a whole generation has grown up and gone into working life without any knowledge of Malay. As for Bazaar Malay, they have no use for it, not even as an inter-ethnic language, since everyone, except the really bad drop-outs, had some competency in English. Of course the quality of English is poor, but all bazaar languages are like that, anywhere in the world. Try speaking to your favorite Korean grocer in New York.

A new twist to the story appeared in the 1980's. Singapore became so short of labour for the menial tasks, we began to bring in foreign workers. Today they are everywhere. They clean up our food courts, collect our rubbish, build our homes and vacuum our office carpets. The men come from Thailand, Bangladesh and India, while the women, who work as domestic maids, come from the Philippines and Sri Lanka. None of them have even heard of Bazaar Malay. So the disappearance of Bazaar Malay has not only been driven by the change in language preferences of the educated set, it has also been pushed by the demographic change at the lower social strata.

Today in Singapore, you can use English when speaking to taxi-drivers, carpenters, hawker-wives and shopkeepers -- the groups with whom it used to be either Chinese or Bazaar Malay. Today, you have to use English if you want to communicate with garbage-collectors, construction workers, maids and cleaners, unless you can speak their indigenous language. You can even order food in Chinese restaurants with English (and that was unheard of, say, twenty years ago) unless the waitress refuses to use English. But if so, with some exceptions, it would still not be a question of inability, but a matter of Chinese chauvinist bloodymindedness -- and that's another story.

In Malaysia, the reverse has been happening. They entrenched Malay (they call the language Bahasa Malaysia) as the language of instruction in all schools in the seventies. Now just about everybody knows Malay though the older generation of non-Malays still use the Bazaar form. On the other hand, increasingly we find that the younger generation, except for the well-educated, can't handle English.

I witnessed a most telling example at Singapore's Changi airport about 5 years ago. The announcer was paging for a woman passenger with a Chinese name, to join her flight, but without success. So some airport officers went around to try to locate her. Since they didn't know what she looked like, they had to go up to selected women and ask if she was so and so. A young airport officer, ethnically Malay, noticed a 30-year-old Chinese woman looking a bit lost. He asked her, in English, what her flight number was. She stared back quite blankly. Seeing that she didn't understand, he asked her for her boarding pass. She didn't understand either, shaking her head. Then he tried a bit of Japanese, in case she wasn't Chinese. No good again. But just then, she opened up in fluent Malay asking where she might find a phone booth for an international call.

The airport officer was so surprised at her choice of language, he couldn't help laughing. "Oh, you're Malaysian!" he exclaimed, not in Malay, mind you, but in English, then chuckled some more as he tried to explain to her in Malay, and rather less fluently than her, that she could use a credit card to call from any phone booth. Actually she could have known that too just by reading the signs, except that in Singapore, all the signs are in English!

In the late 1950's and into the sixties, just about everyone in Singapore believed that this tiny island was a natural part of Malaya. Families had brothers, sisters and cousins on both sides of the border. Merchants in Singapore did lots of business "upcountry". When Singapore separated from the Malaysian federation in 1965, people were numb; they couldn't conceive of how Singapore could be a separate political entity. Singaporeans were Malayans after all, albeit with a slightly different racial mix, and on both sides, Bazaar Malay was the lingua franca.

It's been over thirty years now, since that break. North of the border, Bazaar Malay is being overtaken by proper Malay. Here in Singapore, it is not even the inter-ethnic language any more, it has been overtaken by English. Yet this story about the Great Language Shift merely hints at another, even bigger, story: of how Singaporeans became Singaporeans.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. See also the article Speak Good English (Dec 1999)

Addenda

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