Mother tongues

I was on numerous occasions asked to confirm whether English is my mother tongue. If it is not, I was asked what IS. I was a guinea pig in a psycho-analysis questionnaire. In order to be a guinea pig, I would say, "Yes, English is my mother tongue." The investigators have never had any reason to doubt otherwise. However, I do have several other mother tongues. They are in the chronology of most fluent to least fluent: English, Malay and Penang Hokkien simultaneously (you get what I mean now?).

I’m rather pleased and proud of the fact that my Malay is not similar to the Malay used in Berita Harian, a Malay broadsheet in Malaysia. Their in-house style has so many English words, that to me Berita Harian uses Anglo-Malay, not Malay! Here are some examples previously found in their various reports. Cif Inspektor, bajet, and suspek. I grew up referring to them as Ketua Inspektor, belanjawan and disyaki when conversing in Malay, or Chief Inspector, budget and suspect when conversing in English.

I wait in delight (almost) for the day when Berita Harian prints gomen instead of kerajaan for government, after all people whose first language is Malay ONLY, are already very at home with gomen instead of kerajaan now. If one uses kerajaan whilst having an informal conversation with friends in Malay, one runs the risk of being called skema which has a totally different meaning from its original scheme in English. The Malay skema is somewhat equivalent to the English nerd or (sometimes, and) pompous.

Whilst such is the trend, I think it might be only time when a judge becomes a jaj in Malay. If that was to happen, one would really have to spell check their documents because the learned jaj can very quickly be reduced to a water bearing vessel, jag. After all, the keys G and J are only separated by H on a QWERTY keyboard.

We can’t blame Berita Harian or the everyday Ali, Muthu and Ah Chong entirely. The Malaysian government has introduced a biometric identity card called MyKad. Do they mean MyCard? Shouldn’t it be KadKu? Anybody wants to be asked to produce a KadKu for identification? Miss the D consonant in pronunciation and you end up frozen stiff, kaku.

What are Malaysians doing to Malay and English? Someone once told a university academic in Malaysia, "Please sir, if you delivered the lecture in Malay, I have no problem understanding you. If you choose to do it in English, that’s fine too. But could you please not speak English with Malay, or Malay with English simultaneously?" I never knew whether that person passed the module, or dropped it altogether after that altercation.

Penang Hokkien, one of my mother tongue, is a language I have not used in everyday conversation for almost nine years! I have not spoken Hakka in a similar capacity for even longer, almost twenty years. Thankfully, I have lost neither the vocabulary nor spontaneous fluency when occasionally spoken to in either languages.

Penang Hokkien is not surviving very well either. It is a dialect within Hokkien that was developed by descendants of Hokkien speaking Chinese in Penang. For a start, the number of competent speakers are dwindling as more and more ethnic Chinese in Penang choose Chinese schools which teaches in Mandarin, the mother tongue of people in north-eastern China, including Beijing, its capital. People who went to regular schools which teach in Malay (many schools in Penang still use English as the unofficial lingua franca) would have spoken better Hokkien that their counterparts who attended Mandarin schools. These outcomes are very much due to the tendency of Chinese school students being taught to be proud of Mandarin because it (wrongly, in my opinion) represents Chinese identity. Such misplaced identity is probably due to the fact that Mandarin is the official language of China. These people tend to relegate Hokkien and other Chinese languages like Hakka, Teochew, Cantonese, Fuchow and Hainanese to mere dialects within the Chinese language!

What a preposterous idea! Yes, these Chinese languages might not have the same economic importance as Mandarin due to its official status in China. But they are languages in their own right, not dialects. I am not a linguist, but as a layman, I would say a spoken tongue is a dialect when two speakers of different dialects could understand one another. Therefore Penang Hokkien, Fukkien (China) Hokkien, Singapore Hokkiens are all dialects of Hokkien. In the same manner, Kedah Malay, Johore Malay, Kelantan Malay, Sabahan Malay are all dialects of Malay.

Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, etc. are distinctly different languages! An acid test is a Hokkien speaker wouldn’t understand Cantonese, vice versa if s/he does not know Cantonese to start with. People who still argue that these Chinese based languages are dialects might strengthen their case by pointing out that all of them can be written with the same Chinese ideograms. That to me shows the ingenuity of a Chinese Emperor several thousand years ago who realised that the unifying factor of all the various Chinese tribes in China is language. He theorised that if people from various part of the vast country couldn’t understand each other, there would be no unity; without unity there wouldn’t be a country. If their varied languages were indeed dialects of one another, surely such difficulty wouldn’t have presented itself.

Therefore, Shih Huang Ti (that’s his name pronounced in Mandarin) streamlined everything in all the languages so that the same word in each language will be written with the same ideogram. For example, rice would be written with the same symbol for every language (if you are not familiar with Chinese ideograms, think of the British Union flag, the character is almost similar to the flag). Therefore that ideogram would be read as me in Mandarin, be in Hokkien, and my in Cantonese (I’ve given them in English phonetics). Let’s take another example. The ideogram for I (as in oneself) is the same, but read as wo in Mandarin, wa in Hokkien, ngo in Cantonese, ngai in Hakka.

Penang Hokkien is dear to me because it defines my heritage, a blend of Malay and Hokkien. I would have differed with a Hokkien from China because of this speciation (borrowing a term from Darwin to describe a species diverging into two different sub-species due to isolation brought about by habitat changes over time). Penang Hokkien has many Malay words in its vocabulary. I grew up saying bangku for chair, sabun for soap, jamban for toilet (borrowed from Penang Malay as opposed to tandas in standard Malay), loteng for attic, lientei for necklace (borrowed from Malay rantai), geelang for bracelet (from Malay gelang), sanggui for hair tied up in a bun ( from Malay sanggul), jagung for corn, lili for broom (from Malay lidi), sambai for chilli dip (from Malay sambal), babatai for a type of vegetable (from Malay petai), kueh for cakes (from Malay kuih/kueh), loti for bread (from Malay roti) and tilam for mattress. These are merely a handful which I could recall in five minutes, I’m sure there are many more).

Will my grandchildren still speak fluent Penang Hokkien? Malay which could be understood by the traders who frequented the ports of Malacca? English which could be understood by Englishmen and women without sounding queer to them?

p/s

Will any speakers of other dialects of Hokkien help me complete this list please? Penang Hokkien speakers can help me by adding to the list too.

(Penang Hokkien-Malay-(English)-other dialects of Hokkien)

babatai petai (a type of vegetable) ?
bangku bangku (chair) kau ee
bawang bawang (onion, usually referring to shallots) ?
bedak sejuk bedak sejuk (traditional face powder made from fermented rice) ?
blachan belacan (shrimp paste) ?  
geelang gelang (bracelet) chiew lien
gelai gelas (glass, as in drinking vessel) ? (Ow is cup for Penang Hokkien)
go kha khi  kaki lima (five-foot way).  Here kha khi  is taken from kaki (foot).  Go is original Hokkien for five. ?
jagung jagung (corn) ? 
jamban jamban (toilet) ?
kokueh kuih-kuih (many cakes, well at least more than two) ?
kueh kuih / kueh (cakes) ?
lili lidi (broom made of bundled up fine sticks) ?
lientei rantai (necklace) ? 
loteng loteng (attic) ? 
loti roti (bread) mi pao ?
nana nanah (pus) ?
sabun sabun (soap) ?
sambai sambal (chilli dip, usually with roasted shrimp pate, see below) ?
sampah sampah (rubbish) ?
sanggui sanggul (hair tied up in a bun) ?
teh teh (tea) ?
tilam tilam (mattress) ? (Please don't suggest been cheng, that's the bed, not the mattress). ?

p/ss  Non-Hokkien speakers, I'm not liable to you being laughed at if you were to memorise these words here to impress your friends.  Hokkien, like any other Chinese languages, is a tonal language.  Each sound has four different tones (which I could not define here without adapting from the rather complicated pin yin system developed by China (People's Republic) for Mandarin.  The right sound with the wrong tone means a completely different thing! 

Example:  If you get it wrong, you could be inviting your friends to eat rice (pui), but they might take it that you're telling them that they're fat (pui), or they might be thinking of a cup (pui).

Do consult genuine fluent speakers before attempting it in public.  Of course, if you are cavalier about the whole thing, you're welcome to try it. 

Cosmopolitan779 reminded me of:
subang subang (earrings) hi kau
Her contribution prompted my brains to work.  Yes, I've heard of hee kau, which are dangling earrings to be precise, kau is Hokkien for hooks.   There's another term, hee suie, which are stud earrings.  In Penang Hokkien, there's no term for clip earrings.  These items came after the language 'evolved'.  They are now simply referred to as ke subang, the e sound as in 'are' in snare, the k as in key. Ke subang in literal translation are fake earrings.  I guess the speakers of Penang Hokkien did not hold much regard for the "faint-hearted" who couldn't bring themselves to have their ear lobes pierced but still wanted to put on earrings.