Oh, the Purity!!

As someone who might pretentiously be called a "language expert", I am constantly amazed at the attitudes some people have to language and language use. The other day, I was teaching my Masters in TESL class at the university and one of my students was commenting about the linguistic phenomenon known as 'code switching'. Code switching is where speakers who have access to more than one language will use different languages in the same situation, sometimes even in the same utterance.

Some examples from the Malaysian context would be something like "Oh, my little Timmy, he is so jahat (bad)", or "her anak angkat suda pergi to school" (her foster child already went to school).

People code-switch for many reasons - to signal a change in topic (perhaps English for formal topics, Malay for kampung topics), to acknowledge a change in the social dynamics of a situation (changing into the dialect when granny enters the room), to show off and appear trendy and modern-lah, or sometimes, just because of a lack of vocabulary.

But whatever the reasons why people code switch, it is a linguistic fact that they do do it, and they do it all the time. You only have to live in Malaysia for more than five minutes to see this. And, as a professor trying to understand how English is used in a multilingual society like this one, I fully acknowledge that code switching is a natural part of the linguistic life of this beautiful nation. Lah.

However, many people do not share this view. Apparently, characters in local television dramas have been officially banned from mixing their Bahasa Malaysia with other languages. Scriptwriters can no longer have their characters code-switching. So much for the media reflecting reality, I thought.

This reminds me of the situation back home, where swear words are not allowed on mainstream TV, resulting in some highly creative solutions to the conundrum of how to make your police drama series realistic and relevant, without upsetting the purists. One example of this was Britain's top police drama The Bill. In one hilarious episode, in which a young black policeman was working undercover in a Jamaican gang in London, one of the villains shouted out, when the police burst in to arrest them: "oh no, he's a blasted policeman"! Now somehow I doubt that a real life equivalent of this gangster would use a word like "blasted". More like an expletive beginning with F, I would say.

But I digress. Coming back to code switching, one of my students last week asked me whether I thought that code switching "pollutes" the language. I replied firmly in the negative. For one thing, how can you pollute a language? To argue that we can pollute a language assumes that a language is in some sense "pure" in the first place, and that mixing it up with words or phrases from another language makes it somehow "impure".

Well, by that definition, then, there are not many languages in the world that can be said to be truly "pure". Let's just start with English. The other day, I purchased the latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (revised 11th edition, 2006). Just a quick flick through its august pages will show you just how many words have entered English usage from other languages. Here are a few examples: Bearnaise, Beaujolais, beaux arts, bechamel, beau. And that's just from pages 118 and 119, and all the examples are taken from French.

And what about Malay? Even with my poor knowledge of the language, I know that Malay contains many words from Arabic (most of the Islamic vocabulary), Chinese, Portuguese and of course English. How pure is that?!?!? Yet the language continues to be used effectively in official and non-official circles by all its speakers.

So the point is, that if we use Malay, or English, or any other of Malaysia's plethora of tongues, in a multicultural setting like this one, there is bound to be a certain amount of mixing. And most language experts agree that this is a natural and normal phenomenon.

Code switching is perfectly natural and perfectly safe. It does no harm to the languages involved, in fact it will enrich them by providing lots of interesting new ways that meanings can be expressed. Also, code switching in a multicultural nation like this one brings people together linguistically in a way that no amount of official campaigns and slogans can do. Malaysians happily sharing one another's languages will lead to them happily sharing their country too.

And as for the purists who think that their languages will suffer corruption from all this mixing, I say this: languages are always evolving and changing to meet new needs and situations. It is not a sign of linguistic poisoning for a language's users to mix their codes when the situation demands it, or for the language to admit new words and phrases into its lexicon. Instead, it is a sign that a language is healthy and vibrant, and adaptable.

Obviously, I am not advocating the totally free use of code switching in all situations. There will be some situations, such as official settings, news broadcasts, etc, where such switching between linguistic lanes is not appropriate and may lead to confusion.

However, we have to accept that language is a social communication system which is used by many different kinds of people, for an ever-increasing range of diverse purposes. Language is not a fixed, monolithic thing that never changes. If English, or Malay for that matter were absolutely pure and unchanging, they would have died out long ago because they wouldn't have been able to meet their speakers' needs.