Language and the Malay Muslim Identity: An Insight into Brunei

Abstract

Sitting at a government clinic, a conversation was overheard between a woman and a little girl. They looked characteristically Malay, and because of the hijab on the woman, it was easy to deduce that they are of the Muslim faith. The language used between the mother and her child, however, was unmistakably English with the child almost monolingually so. The mother's utterances, on the other hand, were dotted with some Malay words like the bah particle, but English was noticeably dominant. At a small café in a neighbourhood shopping complex, a group of impressionable young Bruneian ladies were animatedly talking about their driving experiences. Again, the conversation was mostly in English, with a few Malay words inserted every now and then. Like the mother in the previous scene, the ladies were all clad in hijabs, and the authors' assumptions that they are Malay and Muslims were unanimously confirmed by the subjects themselves. What the above scenarios intended to exemplify is that English is now ubiquitous in Brunei, and as research has shown, is the most preferred language for interactions, particularly among young Bruneians. 4 A truly monolingual English-speaking Bruneian may be a rarity, but bilingual Malay-English Bruneians are definitely in the majority. A series of surveys on language use and language preference was recently conducted on 830 Bruneians of Malay ethnicity of various ages. 5 Although a majority claim to have Brunei Malay as their first language or mother tongue (734 or 88.4%), only 360 (43.4%) chose this language as they preferred to use or the one they mostly use for everyday communication. More selected the choice "Brunei Malay and English equally," albeit slightly so (383 or 46.0%), and a handful indicated that they use mostly or only English 1