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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.
