Malaysian Tamils and Tamil Linguistic
Culture
Harold F. Schiffman
South Asia Regional Studies
805 Williams Hall #6305
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
(215) 898-5825
Fax: (215) 573-2139
Abstract
In this paper I examine the position of Tamil as an ethnic
minority and language in Malaysia, and make some predictions about its changes
for survival in the twenty-first century.
Tamils are the largest of the language groups that form the `Indian'
minority in Malaysia, which constitutes around 9 % of the population, or 1.5
million. Tamils constitute about 85% of
this figure. Many scholars see the situation of Indians in Malaysia as somehow
problematical, whether due to preferences given to native-born Malaysians over
immigrant Indians, the socio-economic conditions affecting plantation workers,
or the educational opportunities provided their children. Given a national language policy that emphasizes
integration through Bahasa Malaysia and Islam, and little support for non-Malay
schooling beyond the elementary level, the future of Tamil seems bleak. Since the Tamils in India and Sri Lanka are
known for their intense language loyalty, one might expect to find that their
usual intense language maintenance efforts would result in effective language
maintenance within the Malaysian context.
But Tamils tend to prefer corpus planning to status planning, perceiving
it to be the most important kind of language maintenance. This paper concludes
that in this day and age it may in fact have little relevance in contexts such
as Malaysia and Singapore, and may in fact be counterproductive, contributing
to language shift, rather than maintenance, except under conditions that
replicate the inequality of the plantation economic system.
The purpose
of this paper is to examine the position of Tamil as an ethnic minority and
language in Malaysia, and to make some predictions about the prognosis for
survival of Tamil in the twenty-first century.
Tamils are the largest of the language groups that form the `Indian'
minority in Malaysia, which constitutes around 9 % of the population, or 1.5
million. Within this number, people
classified as Tamil-speaking are about 85%.[1]
In a fairly recent compendium of articles on South Asian immigrants in
Southeast Asia (Sandhu and Mani, eds. 1993) over half of the articles are
devoted to the question of Indian communities in Malaysia---nineteen out of a
total of 37, the rest being devoted to Brunei, Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, Singapore
and Thailand.
All of them
see the situation of Indians in Malaysia as somehow problematical, whether it
be the preferences given to Bumiputra[2]
Malaysians over immigrant Indians, the socio-economic conditions affecting
plantation workers or the educational opportunities provided their
children. I will try in this paper is
to place the issue of Tamil language and language maintenance within the larger
scheme of the future of the Indian community in Malaysia, and see whether we
can predict a prognosis for the survival of Tamil, and indeed the survival of a
Tamil-speaking minority, in Malaysia in the twenty-first century.[3] In fact the future of Indians in Singapore
may be more secure than the languages spoken by them; what would happen if all
Singapore Indians were to become English speakers, and how this would fit the
wishes of the Chinese majority is another question.[4] In a sense, this paper will somewhat
resemble a book review of that portion of the Sandhu and Mani volume devoted to
Malaysia, for it provides the most up-to-date research on the general problems
facing Tamils (and other Indian immigrant communities) in Malaysia. What it
does not do is to discuss in very great detail the fate of the Tamil
language in Malaysia, and here is where I must fill in with my own very
inadequate observations.[5]
Language
policy in Malaysia is a topic that cannot be openly discussed without fear of
being charged under the Sedition Act of 1948.[6]
It is only one of those taboo issues (the place of Islam, the special status of
Malays) that may not be discussed in Malaysia, for fear of disturbing certain
ethnic sensibilities. Therefore the only writing one finds on the topic of
language policy are filiopietistic articles extolling the virtue of the system,
its natural fairness, its commitment to building up the national culture, and
so forth. It can be described, but it
cannot be criticized, so criticism of it will only be made outside the country.
Internal
critics must therefore tread lightly.
The government of Malaysia has itself made some moves that violated, in
some people's views, its own policy toward Bahasa Malaysia. Such was the proposal, made early in 1994,
to allow some science teaching to go on in English, because of the generally
low level of knowledge of English among Malaysians (code for: among Malays)
which would jeopardize Malaysia's ability to modernize and become an
industrialized nation any time soon.
The Prime Minister himself defended this proposal, but he had to
immediately contend with massive criticism from the association of Malay
teachers, who vowed to “not give an inch" to such a “drastic"
change in the language policy.
That this
should cause such a furor must be viewed in terms of the issues it covertly
raises. The problem is not that there
is an inadequate knowledge of English among Malaysian citizens, such that would
jeopardize Malaysia's ability to participate in scientific developments. That is,
though Malaysians of Indian and Chinese background do quite well in
English, and often must seek higher education abroad (though English medium)
because they are denied access to Malaysian institutions of higher learning due
to the ethnic quotas, there are insufficient numbers of Malays or Bumiputras
whose knowledge of English is adequate.
Thus if English-knowing non-Bumiputras are allowed to dominate
the scientific fields, even if it would help Malaysia to modernize, this will
not help the Malays, so it cannot be allowed to happen. What apparently would be the ideal solution
would be a policy to help Malays learn enough English to study science, but not
permit this for non-Bumiputras.
Such a policy would be too blatantly unfair, and therefore impossible to
implement and defend, so it cannot be formulated as such.
My goal, as
originally stated for this paper, was to establish how the Tamils of Malaysia
were maintaining their language in the face of a national language policy that
emphasizes integration through Bahasa Malaysia and Islam. Since the Tamils are known for their intense
language loyalty in India and Sri Lanka, I was expecting to find that their
love of the language and intense language maintenance efforts, manifested in
India and Sri Lanka with strong opposition to Hindi, Sanskrit and English[7]
would result in effective language maintenance within the Malaysian
context. The approach taken by the
Tamils is known as corpus planning or corpus treatment by sociologists of
language; it is perceived by Tamils to be the most important kind of language
maintenance, but in this day and age it may in fact have little relevance in
contexts such as Malaysia and Singapore.
Language
maintenance in Tamilnadu, and in contested Sri Lanka, also involves status
management,[8] and various
measures have been undertaken to restrict the domains of Hindi, Sanskrit and
English (in Tamilnadu, and Sinhala (in Sri Lanka) so that Tamil can recapture
the domains of elementary and secondary education, the media, and so forth. This has been more successful in terms of
keeping back Hindi and Sanskrit, but in the case of Sinhala, of course, the
situation in Sri Lanka has turned into
a civil war. In the case of English, which is perceived in some ways as a
buffer against Hindi (and Sinhala) efforts are ambivalent, and many of those
who decry angilak kalappu use English and even send their children to
English-medium schools. The result is
that English is still the main language of higher education in Tamilnadu; in
Sri Lanka the battle to replace English with Sinhala, even in higher education,
has been much more intense. In India, of course, the central government has no
control over local educational policies, so no attempt to impose Hindi as a
medium of instruction in Tamilnadu universities and colleges has ever been, or
will ever be, attempted.
In
Malaysia (and in Singapore) language policy is not set by the Tamils, and
Tamils are therefore in the position that Telugu speakers or Kannada speakers
are in Tamilnadu: they are a tiny minority, have no say in overall policy
formulation, and are suffered to maintain their languages only for elementary
education, if there.[9] My goal, then, is to show how Tamil ideas
about language and language maintenance, which I hold are rooted in their
notions of linguistic culture, when confronted with Malaysian policy
(and linguistic culture) on language will be in a state of conflict, which in
the end works to the detriment of Tamil language maintenance in Malaysia. I have defined linguistic culture (Schiffman
1996) as the
sum totality of ideas, values, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, myths, religious
strictures, and all the other cultural ideas that speakers bring to their
dealings with language from their culture. Linguistic culture also is concerned
with the transmission and codification of language and has bearing also on the
culture's notions of the value of literacy and the sanctity of texts. Language policy, I maintain, is primarily a
social construct, and as such rests primarily on these other conceptual
elements---the belief systems, attitudes, myths, the whole complex that we are
referring to as linguistic culture.
Educational Policy
A word of
background is in order here on what languages may be used in education in
Malaysia. In “National Schools"
Malay is the medium of elementary education; Tamil and/or Chinese may be taught
if there are 15 students who petition for it.
Otherwise, Tamil and Chinese medium “National-type" Schools
may exist, and they receive varying degrees of government support; Chinese
schools tend to reject total subvention, in order to maintain more
control. At the secondary level, Malay
medium is the only publicly supported schooling available. Privately supported Chinese schools do
exist, but there are none for Tamil, since the Tamil community cannot afford
the expense that such a system would entail.
Again, at the secondary level, Tamil and Chinese may be taught as a
subject if 15 students request it. The Malaysian constitution provides
guarantees for the use of these languages in the above “unofficial
contexts", i.e. they are officially tolerated (also some use in
broadcasting, the Department of Indian Studies at the U Malaya, and support for
teacher training) but this official tolerance is thought of as unofficial since
only Malay may be official.
The German
sociologist of language Heinz Kloss provides a list of language-maintenance
strategies that enhance or hinder language maintenance by minority groups in
immigrant societies like the United States (Kloss 1966, in Fishman 1966). One of the factors that enhances language
maintenance is “pre-immigration
experience with language maintenance", particularly in dealing with
linguistic suppression in the form of underground resistance to education in
another language medium, self-help language schools, etc. Groups that were already ready to cope with
language maintenance in their home country because of suppression there, such
as the Poles under Czarist Russian rule, were more able to “hit the
ground running", as it were, perhaps because the notions that widespread
community involvement was important, everyone had to participate in order to
make it work, everyone had to be eternally vigilant, etc., were accepted.
Tamils who
came to Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia brought strategies with them
that were developed in their home country, and at first these strategies seemed
to work. Essentially these strategies
were:
·
All
schooling through elementary levels should be in Tamil only.
·
The kind of
Tamil needed was whatever was being developed in India and no adaptations or
compromises to local conditions were necessary, or even permissible.
·
English
could be admitted at the higher levels and would in fact be quite useful in the
new environment.
·
Any other
local languages that were useful or necessary (e.g. Malay)
could also be acquired for auxiliary use, but should not be given
first or even second priority.
In the
plantation economy of 19th century Malaya and the Straits Settlements, these
strategies worked quite well. Most
Tamils of the period came with the intention of returning to India at some
point; British education favored Malay only, and no schools in other language
were supported by the colonial power.
Tamils of the more educated classes (actually many were from Sri Lanka)
worked as clerks and supervisors and their knowledge of English was an
advantage to them in this situation, since neither the Malays nor Chinese
seemed to want to require English education.
Plantation Tamils did learn some Malay, enough to get around and do
their work, but in few cases if any did it actually supplant Tamil.[10] A great cultural barrier for most Tamils,
though not all, was Islam, which served to isolate and contain them. Again a
strategy brought from India (keep clear of Islam) helped maintain the
linguistic isolation. Knowledge of
Tamil was necessary to be a good Hindu; it would not constitute a path to
Islam. The few Tamil Muslims that came at
this period were indeed in a different kind of situation, and assimilation through
intermarriage of Indian Muslims and Malays did occur, but mostly with North
Indian Muslims and Malays, not Tamils.
For better or worse, Tamil Muslims tended to remain solidary with Tamil
non-Muslims, and cooperated with them in language maintenance.
Though
Tamils seemed to think that the strategies delineated above would serve them
well in Malaya, these strategies have become increasingly problematical after
independence and under the threat of Malaysia's very stringent language policy. I hypothesize that the strategies brought
from India have not been adapted, in fact may not be adaptable, in the current
environment, and are not serving the cause of Tamil language maintenance.
But this is
not the whole story. Another
all-pervasive and inescapable fact about Indians in Southeast Asia, and
especially in Malaya, is the fragmentary and disunited nature of the
community. This is manifested in
different ways:
·
Indians come
from a number of different parts of the subcontinent, and do not all speak the
same language.
·
Indians are
settled in many different localities, often separated from and in isolation
from others of their own kind.
·
Within any
given language group, there are the usual splits involving caste, religion, and
class. Even if all Tamils were
concentrated in one area, there would be differences that are perceived as
unbridgeable. The gulf between Sri
Lanka Tamils (Rajakrishnan 1993), who acted as overseers and clerks, and
laborer Tamils (from India) was vast.
This
fragmentation and segmentation has remained until the present time, and
underlies many of the current problems facing the Indian community in
Malaysia. As far as Tamils are
concerned, it works against language maintenance in a number of important ways,
and combined with the inadequate and inappropriate language maintenance
strategies brought from India, is now taking its toll on the Tamil
language.
Language Shift
If language
maintenance does not occur, there can be several results. One is language death; speakers become bilingual,
younger speakers become dominant in another language, and the language is said
to die. The speakers or the community
does not die, of course, they just become a subset of speakers of another
language. The end result is language
shift for the population, and if the language isn't spoken elsewhere, it dies.
In the case of Tamil in Malaysia, we do not speak of death because Tamil
continues to live on in Tamilnadu, but the effect is the same. For the speakers who go to their death as
Tamils still, it is a kind of death to see their children shift to another
language.
In Malaysia,
if Tamils shift languages, there are two possible outcomes. One is that they will become Malay speakers;
the other is to become English speakers.
(Chinese is not a practical outcome.)
In fact, few Tamils are becoming Malay speakers, except for individual
Tamil Muslims who intermarry with Malays and whose offspring grow up speaking
Malay. The more general outcome is that
many Tamils, especially well-educated Tamils,
are becoming English speakers.
Less-educated Tamils, however, especially those still living in
plantation communities, continue to speak Tamil, and the prognosis for their
language maintenance is for the time being favorable.
There are a
number of reasons why English-educated Tamils are in fact switching to English
as a dominant language, and there is no one reason that is more important than
others. There is a tendency in the
Tamil community to lay the blame for this shift at someone else's door, but neither
the government's language policy, nor the Tamil community itself, nor the
difficulty of maintaining a Tamil-maintenance infrastructure, nor any other
reason is sufficient alone. In fact
Tamil is doing fine when the conditions that enhance language maintenance
pertain, and these are precisely those enumerated by Kloss for German
immigrants in the US:[11]
·
Isolation
and linguistic islands:
·
Low
educational background and aspirations
·
Small size
·
Great
cultural difference (including religion) between group and majority.
The
plantation economy, where most of the work in rubber and palm oil tapping is
performed by Tamil and other Indian workers, provides a perfect cocoon in which
Tamil can be maintained. Tamil is
admissible as a medium of education for elementary education in Malaysia,[12]
and this is provided to the children of the communities. Because of the segmented nature of Indian
society and its perpetuation in emigration, the kind of workers[13]
who came to do this kind of work tend to have not much cultural capital,
education, and/or aspirations for anything more. Unlike the educated (Sri Lanka) Tamils who worked as clerks and
teachers, knew English, and rose to become a professional urbanized elite,
these Tamils never had educational opportunities, and despite being able
theoretically to go on to secondary education and higher education, do not
aspire to do so. Their elementary
education in Tamil suffices them, and since these small pockets of Tamil
speakers have been (until recently) always located in isolated rural areas, are
perceived as no threat to Malaysian society, unlike the other ethnic minority,
which has congregated in urban areas. Given the religious differences (Hinduism
vs. Islam), plantation Tamils other than Muslim Tamils are unlikely to ever
`merge' with Malay society, either linguistically or culturally. In the article by Marimuttu in the Sandhu
and Mani volume (Sandhu and Mani 1993), the claim is made that the educational
system provided to the plantation Tamils does not raise them out of the
cultural dead-end they are stuck in, and is not designed to do so. This system, according to Marimuttu,
preserves and perpetuates the plantation system in a kind of neocolonial
atmosphere. As such we can imagine that
the Tamil language will be maintained in this environment for the foreseeable
future; as long as their is rubber tapping and palm-oil cultivation, the same
population is bound to continue to do that work, since Malays do not perform
this work, and Chinese are primarily urbanized and in business.[14]
The situation of the urbanized educated Tamil, however, is a different
one. Here we see in operation a number
of other factors that work against language maintenance. One is the pervasive
segmented character of Indian culture, and Indian communities abroad. One can discern linguistic differences,
caste differences, and differences of village and even `national' origin, i.e.
whether Tamils came from India or Sri Lanka. Tamils (and other Indians) in the
urban environment are perhaps even more segmented than are rural tapper
communities, so the urge to work together on language maintenance is weak. Just like Germans of different backgrounds
in the nineteenth century US, Tamils of various backgrounds do not see
themselves as having any interests in common with other Tamils, or at least not
enough to lay aside these differences until it is too late.
Secondly,
the aforementioned language maintenance strategies brought from India turn out,
in post-colonial Malaysia, to be counterproductive. An emphasis on keeping Tamil pure of Hindi, Sanskrit and English
influences is rather futile when the language of threat is Malay. But it is the emphasis on corpus work rather
than status concerns that is counterproductive. It is not the corpus of Malay (or Hindi, or Sanskrit or English)
that is the problem here, it is the status of Malay within the national
language policy that is a problem, but the other issue is that the status of
English in this equation is conflicted.
That is,
this urban group had an original advantage in colonial Malaya because of their
knowledge of English, and used that advantage, and still uses it, despite
obstacles from the official policy, for their own benefit. But in another
sense, the status of English is a danger, since this group of Tamils, and
indeed Tamils everywhere, have not treated the status of English as
problematical.[15] They have
embraced English, and continue to embrace it, as a barrier or buffer against
Hindi, Sinhala, and Malay. The problem
now is that this group has relaxed its guard against English, and too much
knowledge of English now means that this group now knows too little Tamil, and
is in fact not committed enough to Tamil.
In fact, many of my informants, though committed to Tamil, even
professionally (University teaching, Ministry of Education) declared that they
would not put their children in Tamil schools because Tamil schools are a
dead-end, both professionally and socially.
A New Factor: Urban Squatter Settlements.
The
previously described situation, in which Tamil communities either consisted of
rural estate workers or urbanized middle-class Tamils is now complicated by a
third factor, the urban squatter settlement populated by Tamils who have left
the plantations and are now working in various low-paying jobs in urban areas
such as Kuala Lumpur, Johore Baru, and Penang.
They congregate in ‘squatter settlements' (Rajoo 1993, in Sandhu and
Mani 1993) and send their children to Tamil medium schools.[16]
For whatever reasons these communities still choose Tamil medium, the general
overall economic and cultural destitution of these groups means that Tamil
medium prepares them for nothing but the substandard conditions they have
always been subjected to, i.e. it replicates the social inequality: they work
at part-time jobs, in factories at the lowest level, as messengers and
sweepers, and have the highest rate of single-parent families, alcoholism,
crime, prostitution and all the other social evils of the modern urban
underclass. One Tamil stated to me that
it appeared that the Tamils are and will always be the lumpenproletariat
of Malaysia; he saw no way for these Tamils to break out of this cycle and move
up the socio-economic ladder. Those
that manage to do so, by attendance at National Schools, will leave the Tamil
language behind. In his view, Tamil
will only survive in Malaysia if Tamils remain poor and at the lowest level of
society. We therefore now have two language strategies employed by the Tamil
“community" in Malaysia. One
continues to prefer Tamil schooling; the other abjures Tamil schooling and is
economically motivated to prefer Malay and English; Tamil may remain as a home
language, but in many cases not even this happens. This is not to point the
finger; this strategy, of embracing English to the detriment of Tamil, is in
fact a survival mechanism engendered by the national language policy. Several elements of that policy conspire to
cause this:
·
Admission to
higher education is controlled by ethnic quotas, and seats are reserved on an
ethnic basis. If certain ethnic groups
do not use their seats, they are not relinquished to another group, they are
simply not filled. The group that is
not filling its quota is the Bumiputra group. Indians and Chinese who would otherwise be qualified for these
seats must go abroad for higher education.[17]
·
Since it
cannot be determined in advance who will be admitted and who will not, students
must plan for the eventuality of expatriation in order to get higher
education. Planning for expatriation
means planning for high English proficiency.
·
Students who
go abroad for education often do not return, but obtain jobs elsewhere. The
cost of this ‘brain drain' for Malaysia is immense, since, whatever else anyone
cares about who gets educated, a tremendous amount of foreign exchange is
leaving the country to finance this drain, and if the students do not return
(and why indeed should they?) the cost of their education is lost to Malaysia.
·
Students who
otherwise might want to return to Malaysia to work have other barriers to
face. One is quotas (‘glass ceilings'?)
for certain jobs; another is barriers to degree-holders from certain
countries. The general atmosphere is
one of not being wanted. In face of
this, the strategy of planned expatriation via English is not hard to
understand.
·
This
strategy of course colludes with other strategies mentioned above, such as the
predilection of (educated) Tamils to learn English, the strategy of maintaining
a puristic Tamil that has no economic
value, and is therefore perceived as useless, and the strategy of
non-cooperation with other similar groups.
Summary and Conclusions:
The Tamil language has already survived in
Malaysia into the twenty-first century, but perhaps will only continue to do so
in isolated rural pockets, or as the language of a marginalized urban
underclass. When all is said and done,
it is less the overt language policy (as enshrined in the Malaysian
constitution) that determines this outcome than the socio-economic history and
present conditions of the Tamil community in Malaysia. Tamil has no economic value in Malaysia, and
is therefore maintained by the socio-economically destitute as a last vestige
of primordial ethnicity. Since even in
the developed western countries (e.g. the US) a similarly destitute urban
underclass persists, and continues to maintain its own variety of English
despite teachers' attempts to extirpate it, the prognosis for Tamil is unlikely
to be any different in Malaysia.
Glossary:
Angilak
kalappu: The term
used in Tamil for heavy use of borrowed English vocabulary; seen as a
corruption of the language that must be avoided.
Bahasa
Malaysia: The national language of Malaysia, based
originally on dialects of Malay spoken both in the Malay peninsula and in parts
of Indonesia. Mutually intelligible
with Bahasa Indonesia, also based on spoken Malay, but which is more
strongly influenced by Javanese.
Grammar and orthography of the two have been regularized by agreement
between the two governments, but lexical differences remain.
Bumiputra: The term bumiputra `sons of the
soil' is used in Malaysia for all Malay speakers and other indigenous peoples,
who are of the Malay `race' but not necessarily mother-tongue speakers of
Malay. Chinese, Indians, and others (lain-lain) are by definition non-Bumiputra.
Tamilnadu.
The state in southeast India, formerly known as Madras State, where
Tamil is the official language.
Key-Words:
Language
policy, language maintenance, language shift, linguistic culture, Malay,
Malaysia, Tamil,
Acknowledgements:
The research
performed herein was supported in part by a grant from the Fulbright Foundation
for work in Singapore, 1993-94.
References Cited
1.
Kloss,
Heinz. 1966. “German-American Language Maintenance Efforts." in
J. Fishman (ed.) Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague:
Mouton.
2.
Marimuttu,
T. 1993. “The Plantation School
as an Agent of Social Reproduction." in Sandhu and Mani (eds.) 1993, pp.
465-483.
3.
Rajakrishnan,
R. 1993. “Social Change and Group Identity among the Sri Lankan
Tamils." in Sandhu and Mani
(eds.) 1993, pp. 541-557.
4.
Rajoo,
R. 1993. “Indian Squatter Settlers: Indian Rural-Urban Migration in West Malaysia." in Sandhu and Mani (eds.) 1993, pp. 484-503.
5.
Sandhu, K.
S. and A. Mani. 1993.
Indian Communities in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Times Academic Press and Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies.
6.
Schiffman,
Harold F. 1995: “Language Shift
in the Tamil Communities of Malaysia and Singapore: The Paradox of Egalitarian
Language Policy." Southwest Journal of Linguistics, Special Issue
on “Language Loss and Public Policy”, I. (G. Bills, ed.) Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2.
7.
Schiffman,
Harold F. 1996. Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. New York and London: Routledge.
8.
Suffian bin
Hashim, Tun Mohamed. 1976. An
Introduction to the Constitution of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Ibrahim bin Johari, Government Printer.
[1] Below I will deal with the subject of the
increasing number of Tamils who are not actually Tamil speakers.
[2] The term bumiputra `sons of the soil' is used in Malaysia for all Malay speakers and other indigenous peoples who are of the Malay `race' but not necessarily mother-tongue speakers of Malay. Chinese, Indians, and others (lain-lain) are by definition non-Bumiputra.
[3] Contrast this with the articles on
Singapore, where the future of Indians in Singapore is described as “not
without promise." (Sandhu 1993:787, op. cit.)
[4] I have
examined the contrast between Malaysia’s language policy and that of Singapore
as they affect the Tamil language in Schiffman 1995.
[5]
When
I received the request to appear on the panel for which this paper was
originally written, I had hopes to be doing research on the question by means of a Fulbright grant in Malaysia
and Singapore; the research clearance for Malaysia came too late for me to do any but the most perfunctory kind of
research into this issue, but many of the observations I made in Singapore are
pertinent, though one must be careful to not overgeneralize.
[6] The policy, as stated in the Constitution (Amendment) Act, 1971, is that the status of Malay as official and other languages as tolerated, “may no longer be questioned, it being considered that such a sensitive issue should for ever be removed from the arena of public discussion." (Suffian bin Hashim, 1976:324).
[7] The current antipathy is strongest against Hindi and is known as Hindi etirppu; the opposition to Sanskrit was stronger several decades ago, and the opposition to English is mainly to English loan words being borrowed into Tamil (angilak kalappu), not to English as an instrument or as a language per se. The opposition to Sanskrit has had the effect of ridding the written language of almost all traces of loan words from that language; in the spoken language, where no overt rules are prescribed, loan words from Hindi, Sanskrit, English, Portuguese and other languages abound.
[8] I prefer the terms `corpus management' and `status management' to `planning' or `treatment'.
[9] One of the great deficiencies of Indian language policy is the very weak provisions for language groups who live in territories where they are in the minority. It is fine to be a Telugu speaker in Andhra Pradesh; it is not so fine to be one in Kerala, Karnataka or Tamilnadu, and the constitutional provisions to protect such groups are noticeably without teeth. Each linguistic state, having driven out the perceived oppressor and established its own linguistic regime, turns out to be an even more ferocious oppressor of its own linguistic minority groups. The only exception to this comes through bilateral agreements between various linguistic states, but the status of even smaller linguistic groups is totally unprotected.
[10] Only the very anciently-settled and
assimilated Chitty Tamil community in Melaka had become Malay speakers; more
recently arrived Tamils did not.
[11] Note
that Kloss's fifteen factors contain six positive factors, and nine ambivalent
factors; in the current case, factor 1 is unambiguously positive, while 2-4
below are ambivalent, i.e. they can work either way. In the Malaysian case,
combined with factor 1, they are positive in terms of maintenance.
[12] Malay is the medium of “National Schools" and Chinese and Tamil are tolerated as the medium of “National-type Schools", but English is not tolerated for state-supported education. Private schools using English do exist, and private Chinese medium secondary-schools also exist, but they do not receive any state support.
[13] This
point may not be emphasized too strongly: Indian plantation workers, mainly
Tamils, came from the most destitute, impoverished and lowest-caste, including
what used to be called untouchable, backgrounds. They were already socialized to be docile,
servile and unquestioning of authority, and the colonial plantation capitalized
on these attitudes and helped to perpetuate them. In reports from Colonial
Malaya, Indian workers were praised again and again for their docility and
willingness to put up with the most abject conditions, compared with the
Chinese, who were ‘rebellious, entrepreneurial, and uncooperative’ with the
plantation system.
[14] There is some movement out of the plantation economy into urban areas, but neither the schools nor the “profession" of rubber-tapping provide people with marketable skills in the city. Those who do leave are now being replaced by Bangladeshi and Indonesian contract workers to some extent. Another reason for little social movement is that there has been no practical way to mechanize tapping, so there is no way to increase productivity, and wage levels; individual workers must still go to the trees and tap them.
[15] They object to mixing Tamil and English, angilak
kalappu, but they do not object to anyone knowing English.
[16] In at least one case I know of, the urban area has come to the plantation---the Kuala Lumpur megalopolis has sprawled out into Selangor State to engulf former plantation land, which has been converted into luxury housing, but the Tamil school and a squatter zone continue to exist, cheek by jowl with the fancy housing. Such schools persist in their substandard conditions, despite their status as "National-type" schools, which should receive state subsidies, but are provided with very little other than teachers' salaries.
[17] Consider a comparison with a transportation model: imagine an airline that assigned seats on its flights by ethnic quota; if certain seats are not filled because not enough members of a certain ethnic group made reservations, the flight leaves with empty seats, and members of other ethnicities are obliged to travel by some other mode of transportation, or wait for the next flight.