Speaking in tongues

From Economist.com

South-East Asia's language wars continue

HAD he been president of Indonesia, not France, Charles de Gaulle might have modified his famous saying about cheeses and asked how to govern a nation with over 700 different languages. The answer, as elsewhere in South-East Asia, was to impose a “national” tongue.

As the region’s countries became independent, most wanted their citizenry to speak the same indigenous language. But choosing an acceptable candidate sometimes proved difficult, laying the ground for “language wars” that still rage.

A new collection of essays* from the Singapore-based Institute of South-East Asian Studies (ISEAS) reviews the region’s struggles to build monolingual nations. Several themes emerge: first, globalisation is forcing governments to reconsider restrictions on daily use of English; second, with the economic rise of China, governments increasingly see their ethnic-Chinese populations as assets rather than threats; and third, democratisation and decentralisation may revive local and tribal languages. Each of these trends may undermine the quest for a unifying national language.

The language wars have been particularly bitter in the Philippines. Shortly before the second world war, the country—semi-independent but still under America’s sway—chose Tagalog, already widely spoken in the populous region around Manila, as its future national tongue. This annoyed speakers of the archipelago’s 120-odd other languages, so a new, official version was invented, incorporating bits and bobs from other local tongues, called Pilipino, and later renamed Filipino.

Despite recurring rows, the adoption of Filipino by schools and the mass media made the language almost universal. The 2000 census found that 96.4% of those with at least elementary schooling could speak it.

But many Filipinos have come to realise the benefits of speaking English—the de facto world language—and have grown concerned over its waning use. Though the census showed that 64% of over-fives could speak English, their fluency may be fading.

Record numbers of Filipinos work abroad; their remittances help support the economy. Like India, the Philippines has also been enjoying a boom in call centres and other outsourced work that requires good English. So, in 2003, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered schools to “return” to teaching mainly in English (though, as ISEAS’s book shows, most were using it for mathematics and science lessons all along).

That same year, the Malaysian government ordered a return to teaching basic maths and science in English after decades of aggressively promoting Malay. Again, this directive responded to worries that a competitive advantage was being lost (similar concerns surfaced in India and Sri Lanka too). Policies to force Malay down the throats of Malaysia’s large ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities have done more to divide than unite the nation: many minority children now go to separate schools where they mostly speak Chinese or Tamil, as they do at home.

Indonesia’s national language—a version of Malay called Bahasa Indonesia or just Indonesian—is unusual in that it is not the tongue of a dominant group: only about 3% of the population are ethnic Malays. This has helped make it acceptable to the country’s 300-odd other ethnicities, but means that it its adoption has been slow. Even today, while over four-fifths of the population understand Indonesian, only about a third use it as their main language.

Indonesia’s former colony, Timor-Leste (not covered in ISEAS’s book), uses Portuguese, the little-spoken language of a previous bunch of imperialist invaders. That has left it tongue-tied: Tetum, the main vernacular, is seen as insufficiently developed for official use. Many people understand Indonesian but many no longer want to hear it spoken. Having adopted the American dollar instead of a national currency, the country may also see a drift towards English, the language of its rich southern neighbour, Australia.

Most South-East Asian countries have significant ethnic-Chinese minorities, towards whom official attitudes have been at best ambivalent. But China’s growth is encouraging some governments, like Thailand’s, to promote the teaching of Chinese where once they might have discouraged or barely tolerated it.

Similarly, Singapore is dominated by an ethnic-Chinese, British-educated elite that has promoted English as the main working language, but in 1998 the government launched a campaign to encourage people to speak Mandarin. This was soon followed by another to stop standards of English slipping: young Singaporeans tend to speak slangy “Singlish”.

Most South-East Asian schools (Singapore excepted) struggle to teach the basics; teaching world languages as well as the national language may increase their struggles. In some cases—notably Indonesia, where decentralisation since Suharto’s fall in 1998 has boosted provincial power—the challenge will be amplified by demands to restore the status of regional and tribal languages.

Similar pressures may emerge in Thailand. Although standard Bangkok Thai is compulsory for all school lessons, about a third of the population, in the country’s north-east, speak Lao as their native language—in December’s election candidates courted voters there by addressing them in their own tongue.

Even authoritarian Vietnam is increasingly allowing broadcasts in the languages of its small ethnic minorities. If Myanmar ever democratises, its many ethnic groups will doubtless seek a rollback of official efforts to promote Burmese, though, as the ISEAS book notes, these have in fact helped opposition groups to communicate with each other.

More worryingly, teaching global as well as local languages may entrench class divides: while rich metropolitan kids enjoy increasing returns from learning English and Chinese, schools in the impoverished provinces, expected somehow to teach global, national and local tongues, may fail to equip their pupils adequately in any.

“Language, Nation and Development in South-East Asia”, edited by Lee Hock Guan and Leo Suryadinata, published by the Institute of South-East Asian Studies, Singapore.