I planned to focus on the influences of the Middle East on Southeast Asian politics, and taking Modern Standard Arabic seemed smart. My own Arabic study began during my undergraduate degree. I was-and am-happy to be in some participation, however minimal, in the conversation with broken language skills.Īrabic, to me, is not truly “foreign.” Islam’s history in Malaysia brought language from the Arab world Malay was once written in a version of Arabic script, Jawi. One of the Loneliest Places on Earth.” Maybe because I saw this ad every day on the Tube and was influenced, I never wanted to be there in that lonely, edgy place-in any language. In the early 2000s, in the UK, there was an ad campaign for The Economist that went: “On the Edge of a Conversation. I suppose this pursuit of languages, half-hearted as it was most times, was in the service of unending curiosity, and wanting to read and understand. The expectation of knowing was placed on the reader-a stance which I don’t disagree with. Absolutely untranslated, from my recollection. Even what some might insist on terming pure English literature (say Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, which I found wretchedly difficult at school in the UK) contained dialogue in French. The nature of global capitalism and culture placed English and European languages as the foreign ones, the ones that permitted access to culture and art with some mastery, or at least a tiny grasp of. They were merely methods of communication in different spaces-the night market, the noodle stall, and my grandmother’s house. I grew up exposed to multiple Asian languages, but these never seemed special in any way. My abandoned languages, however, are an alternative history, largely of laziness, in and out of language classrooms. Still, a mother tongue of English(es) and a jumbled accent form a partial biography. Easily these are all different languages once at a friend’s home in Brooklyn, I asked for a “plaster” for a bleeding cut on my finger and was directed to the hardware shop (or rather “store”) for what they thought was a request for construction supplies. The sound of my own English is now a mix of the London where I lived until my mid-twenties and the Americanisms of the decade-plus spent in the US, with the songlike base of my original Malaysian English. ![]() ![]() Chinese dialects and Tamil also formed part of his daily speech, as it did for most Malaysians, then and now. Educated during colonialism, he spoke English at home, more so than the Malayalam of his ancestors who came to Malaysia generations before, and Malay to the outside world. It is the first language of my mother, who is from an Anglo-Indian minority, and the only language in which I spoke to my father. Empire made English my mother tongue-and the only one I have any real dominion over.
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