Bilingualism

Applied Linguistics in Southeast Asia

W.K. Ho, R.Y.L. Wong, in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), 2006

Bilingualism in Multilingual Societies

Societal bilingualism in Southeast Asia is extremely complex even without considering the multilingual versatility of tribal minorities in the border areas of Thailand, Myanmar, and the three Indochinese states. Only two main types of societal bilingualism are outlined here. According to Tay (1985: 191), societal bilingualism may be classified according to the status of the languages, whether they are major, minor, regional, or international (or languages of wider communication). The two examples are as follows:
(a)
a major language + language of wider communication (e.g., Tagalog–English; Bahasa Indonesia–English; Malay–English; and Thai–English);
(b)
major language + national language + international language (e.g., Javanese/Madurese + Bahasa Indonesia + English; Mandarin + Malay + English).
The choice of an individual bilingual's repertoire in any one situation is governed by a variety of different factors: (1) the geographical area in which a language or dialect predominates, e.g., a bilingual Chinese speaker can expect to use Cantonese rather than Hokkien (two Chinese dialects) in certain towns in Malaysia because a particular town (e.g., Kuala Lumpur or Ipoh) is predominantly Cantonese-speaking; (2) domains, such as family, friendship, business transactions, employment, religion, and education. Domains may be classified along a range of formality or informality. Certain codes are typically used in certain domains; e.g., in Malaysia, Standard Malay is generally used in the more public and formal domains, whereas Bazaar Malay is used in interactions with the non-Malays in the market place. Similarly, the official languages are used in the educational domain in Singapore, but Chinese dialects continue to be used, to a lesser extent now, in family and friendship domains, especially in interactions with the elderly.
A few countries in Southeast Asia describe their education systems as bilingual, but the models of bilingual education in Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines differ in many ways. Nonetheless, it is possible to argue that they are all bilingual to the extent that there are clear societal roles for the languages taught at school. Whereas Singapore and Brunei have a declared bilingual policy, the policy of Malaysia is not explicitly stated as being bilingual, although it now is for certain grade levels in schools. English has a special place in each of the four models, with the instruction time allocated to English varying from model to model. Probably, as a result of time provision and the different linguistic environments in the four countries, the outcomes of the different models have been different – Malay-dominant bilingualism for Malaysia and Brunei in the rural sector and English-dominated bilingualism in the urban areas among the non-Malay-ethnic speakers, whereas that of the Philippines may be described as Filipino-dominant bilingualism. Singapore's situation was described by Pakir (1992) as English-dominant bilingualism, although with the success of the Speak Mandarin Campaign in the past 25 years (1979–2004), there is now a greater proportion of Mandarin-dominated bilingualism. These terms for different patterns of bilingualism do not adequately recognize that the language situations in these four countries are diglossic in the sense that each major language serves different social functions.