Recently, several language experts polled by Malay Mail have said that it is time to call Bahasa Malaysia as Bahasa Melayu once and for all, to cement its position and to ensure that the majority Malay community can preserve its heritage.
“The basis is that there is no such thing as Bahasa Malaysia, so Bahasa Melayu is the ‘rightful’ term,” said renowned Malay language academic Datuk Nik Safiah Karim.
As a non-Malay, I have to agree with Nik Safiah’s view that there is no such thing as a Bahasa Malaysia, because I also don’t think there is such a thing as a Bangsa Malaysia.
Without a people, how can there be a language?
From the day the term came into existence until today, Bangsa Malaysia has always been promoted as a race that will come into existence in the future. Unlike any other race in the world, Bangsa Malaysia has never existed in the past or the present. The future however, is like the horizon. The closer you get to it, the further it moves away. More than 60 years since Malaysia was created, we are still nowhere close to creating a Bangsa Malaysia.
The basis for presuming that a Bangsa Malaysia came about after the formation of Malaysia. Because there is a country called Malaysia, some intellectuals in the past had simply presumed that there is bound to be a people called the Bangsa Malaysia at some point in the future, and these people, it was also presumed, will naturally have a language that they will use to communicate with each other, which will be called Bahasa Malaysia.
This order of creation, where you create a country first, people second and language third does not follow the conventional order or creation. By convention, it is the people who are supposed to come first, language second and country last.
It is perhaps because it was created against the conventional order of creation, that Bahasa Malaysia has never fully manifested in reality. It at best, exists today in a pidgin form, that is looked down upon even by its own kind in the very place where it was born.
Disowned like an illegitimate orphan even by the people who brought it to life, it is unwelcome in any home or institution of respect.
Without a decent place to find boarding in its own home, it spends its time roaming about in the streets and markets of the nation, where it finds solace in the company of foreign workers, misfits and outcasts, who also do not feel at home in our nation.
If we want to find Bahasa Malaysia, don’t look in the schools and universities. Don’t look for it in works of literature or a dictionary, library or the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.
To find Bahasa Malaysia, you must look for it in the lips of a Bangladeshi foreign worker trying to negotiate with a local employer.
It is the language a gangster of one race uses to communicate with a policeman of another race, when they come face to face.
It is the language that Ajib was speaking, when he said to Shak “ heiiiiiii! lu sembang... lu hantam ma,kasi mati ini hali satu kali,wa pun suda bosan hali hali tengok lu punya muka lu tau ka? heii shak!! lu rembat malik, wa rembat lu, “ in KL Gangster.
Bahasa Malaysia is a transient and existential language. Unlike Bahasa Melayu, Mandarin or Tamil, it doesn’t desire to encode the wisdom of its previous generations of speakers, pass it down to successive generations and serve a race or a nation for posterity.
Bahasa Malaysia has no previous generation. It will not have a next generation. The speakers of Bahasa Malaysia will always only exist in the present. Even if Bahasa Malaysia is to exist for 1000 more years, it will only exist only to serve just the present generation for the present moment.
Bahasa Malaysia has no past or future because it is just the language of last resort in the country. If you don’t think that the person you are communicating with can understand your mother tongue or English, Bahasa Malaysia is what you will use to speak to them.
It is the language you use with someone you need for a short period of time, without desiring to know anything about them above face value.
If you find two people speaking to each other in Bahasa Malaysia, it means both of them don’t recognize or refuse to recognize each other as one of their own.
Nehru Sathiamoorthy is the author of “While Waiting for the World to end”. He was a columnist at FMT and a frequent contributor to the South China Morning Post, The Star, Malaysia-Today, MalaysiaNow, MalaysiaKini and Focus Malaysia.
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