Political and Economic Influences on Multilingualism and Multijuralism

Abstract

The importance of contextualising language practices historically and politically is emphasised by key figures throughout the field of language planning, including Fishman (1968), Kaplan and Baldauf (1997:13), and Lo Bianco (2004). The current language policy for Malaysian law is a response to complex sociopolitical tensions that were already at play in the colonial era. This chapter begins (2.1) with an account of how colonial administrative, educational and legal policy privileged English by restriction rather than propagation, positioned Malay as an integrative medium while failing to accord it sufficient instrumentality to extend it beyond its traditional user- and use-based speech communities, and sowed the seeds of postcolonial communalist politics and multijural law. The subsequent section (Sect. 2.2) describes how language was at the centre of differential conceptions of postcolonial nationhood that led to a communalist model of development privileging Malay ethnicity. The final section (Sect. 2.3) describes how language issues and communalist politics have influenced the main institutional components of Malaysian law.