A History of English Language

A history of the english language 308
by the culture and native languages of South Asia, and in turn it will affect those
languages and serve as the medium for Western influences on the culture.
5. Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong.
The development of English as a second language in the Pacific rim is especially
interesting because of the influence of background languages (the Chinese dialects
Hokkien, Cantonese, and Mandarin; Malay; the southern Indian Tamil) and because of
the effects of different language policies instituted by the various governments.
Historically, the Malay peninsula has been among the most important trading areas of the
world, the site of a productive if sometimes uneasy cultural mix of Chinese, Malays,
Indians, and, since the sixteenth century, Europeans. The state of Malacca on the Malay
peninsula was ruled by the Portuguese from 1511 to 1640, then by the Dutch, and, after
1824, by the British. In 1819 Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore at the tip of the
Malay peninsula, which together with Malacca and Penang became a British crown
colony, the Straits Settlements. From the very beginning, Singapore prospered
economically, and throughout the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, English
was an important language of government, business, and education.
When independence came to the British colony in 1957 Singapore was originally
federated with the Malaysian mainland and islands that surrounded it. The separation of
the states two years later resulted partly from ethnic and cultural tensions between the
Malays, who formed a majority of the population outside of Singapore, and the Chinese,
who formed a majority of the population within Singapore. These different cultural
settings are reflected in the subsequent history of the English language in the region.
During the 1970s a national fervor in Malaysia brought about a policy of promoting
Bahasa Malay as the official language, and the use of English declined rapidly. By the
mid-1980s, however, it was clear that the advantages that had been gained in unifying the
country’s diverse ethnic populations under a national language had been offset by the
growing inability of Malaysians to read English, including scientific publications, and to
compete internationally in commerce. A former vicechancellor of the University of
Malaya described the situation: “You should sit among the students in the library. You
see these people open the book and they don’t move the pages. And they’re looking
awfully concerned.” 31 Recently, the Malaysian government has quietly begun to
reemphasize English.
In Singapore the changing relationship between English and the Asian languages has
been in a sense the reverse of that in Malaysia. With English as
31
Margot Cohen, “Malaysian Students Struggle to Cope with Language Shift,” Chronicle of Higher
Education (June 8, 1988), p. A29.