Malaysia is a place where people speak a variety of languages, as its population is ethnically diverse. Mandarin, a language that has economic significance, is also officially accepted, though the country’s Chinese populations have different Chinese heritage languages. In their article, “The Double-Edged Sword of Mandarin: Language Shift and Cultural Maintenance among Middle-Aged Chinese-Malaysians,” Teresa Wai See Ong and Robert A. Troyer study the adoption of Mandarin in different areas of life by middle-aged and older Chinese-Malaysian groups who have different ethnic Chinese roots. The authors argue that while the strategic shift from Chinese heritage languages to Mandarin can prove to be beneficial to this group in several aspects, it comes at the cost of losing heritage languages in the multilingual society of Malaysia.
The authors begin by studying the historical development of Chinese community in Malaysia and the country’s education system, which has a significant role in transmitting culture and building a sense of national identity. Bahasa Melayu is Malaysia’s sole national and official language, though there is no penalty or sanction against the use of other languages. The Chinese population in the country consists of different ethnolinguistic groups, among them Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew, Hainanese, Taishanese, and Fuzhou. In the past, Chinese groups had to establish their own Chinese-medium schools, with earlier Chinese-run institutions using Chinese heritage languages, followed by institutions that used Mandarin as the language of instruction. The prominent shift to Mandarin in Chinese-medium schools can be traced to the early 1920s when Mandarin was adopted as the official language of People’s Republic of China, which led to Chinese schools in Malaysia adopting Mandarin as the main language of instruction. Currently, schools receiving government funding teach in Bahasa Melayu with English and/or Mandarin as subject languages. With the rise of China as another leading player in the global economy, however, Mandarin has become more popular and virtually ubiquitous in the education system. For many Chinese-Malaysian parents, Chinese-medium education is perceived as the only way of preserving Chinese language and culture, and fostering and strengthening the Chinese identity in their children.
Realizing how current studies tend to focus more on Chinese-Malaysians of early-adult age and younger, the authors seek to understand this change from the perspective of older generations through interviews conducted with six Chinese-Malaysians aged 40 and above. The aim is to learn about the areas of their lives in which the group uses Mandarin, how Mandarin helps construct their identity in different settings, and the social factors that influence them to adopt Mandarin.
The authors identify four significant roles of Mandarin for older Chinese-Malaysians. First, Mandarin serves as a home language. Chinese-Malaysians choose to use Mandarin and Teochew depending on factors like personal language preference, family members they talk to, and the particular language a given situation requires a person to use. Whether participants show their reactive or proactive agency in different cases, one certain result is the shift from Chinese heritage language to Mandarin. Second, Mandarin is used as an occupational language. One participant learned and adopted Mandarin as an adult, as the language became a necessity for him to perform his work more successfully. This case reflects how language shifts are not restricted to a particular stage of a person’s life, but are rather subject to larger forces in society. Third, Mandarin acts as a religious language. Mandarin serves as a lingua franca in the religious domain, being particularly helpful when it comes to religious chanting for people with diverse linguistic roots. Lastly, Mandarin is a language for cultural transmission. Naming can represent cultural and ethnic identity through particular spellings and pronunciations of names. However, as Mandarin and Hanyu pinyin are taught in schools, an ethnic Chinese-Malaysian parent views this standardization of written Chinese as beneficial to spelling surnames so? that they can be correctly read while still conveying Chinese identity.
After all, how Chinese-Malaysians of middle-age and older choose to use Mandarin instead of their Chinese heritage languages is influenced by hegemonic forces on both local and global levels. These people exercise their agency in shifting between languages, and they do so with purpose and are not coerced against their will, as they hold that Mandarin can be instrumental in connecting people with Chinese roots and maintaining Chinese identity in multicultural and multilingual Malaysia – though it indeed entails the loss of Chinese heritage languages that once bonded Chinese diasporic groups. One can learn from this study that the issue of preserving and shifting languages can be complicated and that it is crucial to look at the lived experience of people whose lives are directly tied to such languages in order to understand what it means for them to choose one particular language over another.
Petcharee Somwong