English, identity en Malaysian English (success)

English, identity and the Malaysian workplace
Shanta Nair-Venugopal
Department of English Language and Literature Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000
ABSTRACT

This paper, which is an outgrowth of an ethnographic study of code and style choice in two Malaysian business organizations, explains individual and institutional choices as locally motivated pragmatic selections within the specific contexts of the workplace settings and the larger Malaysian sociolinguistic context of English as the normative choice of Malaysian business and Malay as the lingua franca. Malaysian English (ME) as the prevailing sociolect emerged as the unmarked choice in Malaysian business, rather than approximations to exonormative models, such as Standard British English, thereby challenging traditionally imposed norms of speech in Malaysian business settings which are a legacy of British rule and business links. Localized speech variation was consistently demonstrated. Sub-variants of ME spoken in ethnically distinct ways, mainly in the prosody of the native languages of the speakers, as ethnolects, together with style shifting along the full varietal range of ME, and the code-mixing of English and Malay and code-switching into Malay, were the most common ways of speaking in these settings. They voice local notions of language and communication through ethnic speech diversity in the projection of specific social and cultural personae and identities.