After months of heavy lobbying by socially minded ultra-nationalists, the Malaysian state government has legislated a ban of the English language in sectors of higher education. This bold move against multilingualism in a country that was once a British colony has infuriated business leaders and educators while, proponents argue, giving more Malay students a chance at college.
The pressure for universities worldwide to ensure student fluency in English is at once pragmatic and problematic. Since 2003, math and science courses at the university level have been taught in English after Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad deemed that doing so was essential to keeping the country's workforce competitive in the global economy. His successor has caved in to pressure to remove this law and revert to the Bahasa language by 2012, for practical social reasons as well as nationalistic ones.
On the one hand, those against the English ban argue that a multilingual workforce is vital to attracting multinational companies to the country, without which a dearth of jobs may lead to social unrest. On the other hand, those against the ban claim that it levels the playing field for aspiring students from rural areas who rarely receive any education in English, unlike their urban counterparts who often do from an early age. So the dilemma can be put thus: learn English and work, don’t learn English and go to college.
There is a deep disjunction between linguistic catering on the part of labor producers to multinational corporations, which are ironically trying to cater to local consumer markets in their own languages. The notion of "English as a world language" and national languages do not necessarily have to conflict with the notion of language rights as human rights. But banning languages for any reason creates more problems than it solves. English as a global lingua franca is a current event a long time in the making, however we must beware of it creating a monolingual rather than a multilingual future.
See Antony Adolf's Multilingualism and Immigration in U.S. Public Policy for more on these issues.
Linguistic knowlege of various internatinal languages makes the communication circle and the excahange of international-infornation-range of a country very wide globally... and today is the 'world of inforamtion'....
Posted by: course french paris | September 05, 2009 at 01:17 AM
nice post, but there should not applied any type of prevention against english language. none of work doesn't work without this lang . .
Posted by: learn english new york | July 28, 2009 at 02:22 AM
I doubt English as a "world language" is going to create a monolingual future. In the past there have been other "world languages" such as Latin and French, that did not make the world monolingual, on the contrary. The best solution in Malayasia would be to have more English instruction in rural areas rather than remove the English alltogether.
Posted by: Marilena | July 15, 2009 at 02:14 PM