WE are in the midst of the National Language Month (Bulan Bahasa Kebangsaan) 2014. BBK has been observed in one form or another since the early sixties. Essay-writing competitions, oratorical contests, poetry recitals, musical presentations and the like are among the programmes that accompany this month. The overall purpose is to promote the use of Bahasa Malaysia as an expression of the nation’s identity and as an instrument of national unity.
During the launch of this year’s BBK, the Deputy Prime Minister who is also the Minister of Education, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, announced that the Ministry of Education, in collaboration with Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) and the Institut Alam dan Tamadun (ATMA), has begun conducting an audit on the use of the national language in six public universities. The audit will look at how extensively Bahasa is used in lectures and in academic writings, among other aspects of university work. In the next stage, the audit will cover all public universities. It will then be expanded to include private universities.
If the goal of this audit is to determine the extent of usage of Bahasa, it should also include the seven different primary school streams in the country and the different types of secondary schools. There is no reason why the public sector, government-linked companies and the private sector should not also be subjected to this audit. Of course, the format of the audit would be structured to fulfil the needs of the different sectors and sub-sectors of society. But the all-encompassing aim would be to obtain for the first time since Merdeka a clear picture of the breadth and depth of the use of Bahasa Malaysia in the life of the nation.
In carrying out this exercise, the agencies involved should also try to find out if there is any correlation between Bahasa usage in a particular institution and the level of interaction among people of different communities. It would give us an idea of the impact of Bahasa upon inter-ethnic relations. Socio-economic and socio-cultural factors, apart from gender, generational and geographical considerations, could also be interwoven into this analysis.
Information of this sort would be immensely valuable in addressing current challenges the nation faces in giving meaning and substance to the role of Bahasa. A comprehensive Bahasa audit with a national unity focus would enable us to adopt a more effective approach towards the integration of the new generation in particular. It would also assist us in defining and demarcating the relationship between Bahasa on the one hand and the other Malaysian languages on the other.
What is important however is that once the audit is done, there should be a serious and sincere endeavour to strengthen the use of Bahasa at various levels of society. It should be a truly national effort with non-Malays playing lead roles. DBP for instance, which since 1956 has been charged with propagating the national language, should be transformed into a genuinely multi-ethnic agency with perhaps a Chinese Malaysian as its director-general or at least its deputy director-general.
At the same time, non-Malay institutions and organisations in politics, business and culture with mass memberships should initiate sustained campaigns to encourage their constituents to use Bahasa. It is a pity that not a single Chinese or Indian outfit with a huge following has ever attempted to encourage its members and supporters to use Bahasa extensively, especially in exchanges within the community.
This is one of the reasons why the vast majority of Chinese and Indian Malaysians have not developed a sense of ownership vis-à-vis Bahasa Malaysia. In fact, they have shown very little real empathy for the language which they use and study only for functional purposes.
They should be convinced — as some Malay elites themselves need to be convinced — that Bahasa has the ability to bring various communities together for the larger good.
In a vast archipelago of thousands of ethnic groups, it was Bahasa that broke down barriers and helped evolve a shared cultural ethos that gave the diverse peoples of Nusantara a sense of oneness in the old days.
It is significant that even those who were not from Nusantara — Arabs, Indians and Chinese — were integrated into this oneness partly through Bahasa. Small groups of Chinese and Indians who had settled down in Melaka, Terengganu, Kelantan and Kedah for hundreds of years from pre-colonial times and were absorbed into the local populace through Bahasa would be outstanding examples of this.
One could go further and argue that contemporary Indonesia with a multitude of diverse ethnic groups held together by a common language — Bahasa Indonesia — is also an eloquent testimony to the power of Bahasa to forge a remarkable degree of integration. No other language could have achieved this feat. It is something Indonesians are proud of just as they are proud of the fact that Bahasa is one of the 10 major languages in the world.
So let us view the auditing of the use of one of the great languages of the world as essential to the noble mission of realising the full potential of Bahasa Malaysia as a language that will pave the way for the emergence of a more integrated and united nation.