Malayophony, mutual intelligibility and intercomprehension. New avenues for sociolinguistic research in Southeast Asia
Regional integration in Southeast Asia and language resources
In recent years, the Southeast Asian region has become increasingly integrated, not only institutionally (ASEAN - Association of Southeast Asian Nations https://asean.org/ ), but also in terms of human mobility (tourists, legal and illegal migrant workers) and the exchange of goods.
From a linguistic point of view, this integration involves above all the use and wider dissemination of a language, exogenous but international and considered neutral: English. However, the region has its own linguistic resources, including two remarkable transnational groups: Thai-Lao and Malay. The latter, which is massive, brings together four countries in the region whose two main national languages are two closely related variants: the Malay of Brunei, Singapore and Malaysia (in the latter country known as "Malay") and that of Indonesia ("Indonesian"), with 306 million speakers[1], or 45% of the Southeast Asian population. This is what I call "Malayophony".
If, apart from English, it is illusory to envisage linguistic integration covering the entire region, these transnational languages make it possible to define two linguistic subsets where the circulation of people and cultural products with a high linguistic content, such as television programs, films and songs, is greatly facilitated.
In this context, the question of mutual intelligibility between the two main standard variants, Malay and Indonesian, is by no means confined to the activities of an Indonesian-Malay linguistic cooperation. In addition to this "institutional Malay-speaking", there is a "real Malay-speaking" community of migrants (at least one million legal Indonesians in Malaysia in 2014) and tourists (2.5 million Malaysians in Indonesia in 2018), not to mention the cultural products mentioned above, all of which use Malay, whether in its standard form or not. Last but not least, it addresses the question of training in Indonesian-Malaysian provided by Inalco and other establishments.
Mutual intelligibility and intercomprehension
"Mutual intelligibility"[2] and "intercomprehension"[3] between Malay speakers are the very subject of a research project initiated back in 2017 and resumed in the second half of 2019[4]. This question has not yet aroused much interest among sociolinguists working on Malay, even though this field of study, which emerged in the 1960s, has enjoyed great dynamism over the last twenty years, albeit, above all, for Germanic languages.
This lack of enthusiasm reflects exactly what is happening in the field of sociolinguistics.
This lack of enthusiasm reflects the national preoccupations of (socio-)linguists in the countries concerned, as well as the state of institutional Malay-speaking and linguistic cooperation between Indonesians, Malaysians and Bruneians within a common organization (MABBIM - Majlis Bahasa Brunei-Indonesia-Malaysia - "Language Council of Brunei-Indonesia-Malaysia" [5]): after the initial success of a common Latin orthography (1972), this cooperation got lost in the long meanders of a terminology harmonization policy that is now moribund and with unconvincing results[6].
In fact, Malaysians are so indifferent to the national languages of their Indonesian neighbors, and vice-versa, that the very fact of having managed to involve Malaysian (Universiti Malaysia), Bruneian (Universiti Brunei Darussalam) and Indonesian (Universitas Indonesia) partners in this research project was an achievement in itself, confirmed by the fieldwork subsequently carried out in Malaysia and Brunei (the Indonesian fieldwork having been postponed to 2020 due to the health crisis). Although overcome, this indifference nevertheless heralds a future difficulty in analyzing the results: the scarcity of researchers with equal mastery of the two standards.
What to measure and how?
In the absence of anything other than exploratory work, but often based on intuition alone, linguists, grammarians and dialectologists consider Malay mutual intelligibility to be good in some cases, bad or non-existent in others... The few scientific assessments that have been carried out rely mainly on lexico-statistical bases and lexical tests[7], which say little about the reality of this mutual intelligibility and leave the question of usage, particularly in intercomprehension, completely out of the equation. The attitude of the speakers themselves is often ambiguous, while generally acknowledging that when exchanging with a neighboring speaker, "by and large, the message gets through". This being the case, it's clear that the representations, the fruit of very different histories and sociolinguistic situations, of strictly national linguistic and identity policies[8], reflected by the use of different glottonyms, lead speakers to forget the common basis of the language and exacerbate differences. However, we must not overlook purely linguistic factors, among which interactions between regional and national languages and the dialect variation of Malay specific to each national group play a significant role. To give just two examples, Malaysian speakers have difficulty understanding Jakartanese (a sub-standard dialect of Indonesian), and the many borrowings from Indonesian to Javanese are as foreign to them as Bas-Breton would be to a French speaker from Wallonia.
The present project aims to go beyond mere representations, starting with a measurement of mutual intelligibility between standard Malay speakers, and determining the factors behind this intelligibility. To this end, two series of surveys have been defined (opinion tests and comprehension tests, accompanied by individual interviews) in each of the partner countries, with the use of cross-tests to establish the symmetry or asymmetry of intelligibility. For practical reasons (logistics, availability of a captive audience), but also because these students have had little exposure to the neighboring variant, other than through short stays or the cultural products that circulate between Malay-speaking countries, the test populations are made up of first-year undergraduates (Bachelor's and BTS programs). Surveys carried out in Europe generally use this or a similar profile. The results gathered from 160 students in Malaysia and Brunei are currently being processed.
The study of intercomprehension and therefore language practices, mainly among Malaysian tourists in Indonesia and Indonesian migrant workers in other Malay-speaking countries, remains to be further defined. Much more delicate[9] and based on a qualitative approach, it will require other, highly localized survey devices, and other researchers than those currently involved in the project. There's a great opportunity here for doctoral research, unexplored today.
From translation to didactics
I mentioned above the numerous, highly popular Malay-speaking cultural products circulating between the countries of the Malay-speaking world, which the surveys indirectly report on. Indonesian soap operas and Malaysian animated films, generally broadcast in subtitled versions, translated popular novels (rather rare), variety songs (never translated), joint bidialectal television or film productions (in the process of emerging), all form a corpus that begs to be exploited under different aspects and in different related or unrelated disciplines, from intralinguistic translation to audiovisual policies, not forgetting the central problem of representations.
The final aspect of the question is the teaching of the different variants of Malay in higher education institutions outside the Malay-speaking countries; indeed, unsurprisingly, for each of these countries only the national standard has a place in language training programs for non-native speakers. Here, more than anywhere else, foreign researchers encounter local indifference, as "Indonesian for foreigners" (Bahasa Indonesia untuk Penutur Asing, BIPA) is first and foremost a political project, as is its Malaysian equivalent. It is therefore of the utmost interest to Inalco and its counterparts in Europe and elsewhere: what objectives, what tools, what pedagogy? All this has already been sketched out[10], but has yet to be put into practice.
Jérôme Samuel
University professor of Malay language and literature
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Member of the Southeast Asia Center (CNRS-EHESS-Inalco)
Member of the editorial board of the journal Archipel
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[1] This calculation only includes the Malay-speaking population of Singapore.
[2] The main aim of research into "intelligibility" in closely related languages - in this case, variants of the same language - is to measure the intelligibility of a V2 variant among speakers of a V1 variant, mainly by means of comprehension tests, and to determine the causes, linguistic or otherwise, as some work takes into account educational issues and representations.
[3] "Intercomprehension" is a practice that refers to a type of exchange in which two speakers of V1 and V2 variants of the same language (or closely related languages) communicate, each expressing themselves in their own variant.
[4] This second fieldwork was supported by Inalco and the Institut des sciences humaines et sociales du CNRS as part of the "Soutien à la mobilité internationale 2019" program.
[5] The Singaporeans are only "observer" members of MABBIM.
[6] Samuel J., 2005. Politique terminologique et modernisation lexicale: le cas de l'indonésien, Paris-Louvain: Peeters.
[7] The best of these works is: Omar A. H., 2002. "Wujudkah tembok bahasa antara bahasa Malaysia dan Indonesia?" in Setia dan Santun Bahasa, Tanjong Malim: Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, pp. 115-135.
[8] Samuel J., 2010. "Les voies de l'aménagement linguistique dans le monde malayophone", Téléscope, 16-3, p. 135-155.
[9] Access to Indonesian migrant workers, domestic servants, construction or plantation workers promises to be complex and politically more sensitive.
[10] Samuel J., forthcoming. "Le traitement de la variation - des variations - dans l'enseignement de l'indonésien", in Forlot G. & Ouvrard L. éd, Variation linguistique et enseignement des langues. Le cas des langues moins enseignées, Paris: Presse de l'Inalco. Only Australian researcher M. Mintz has developed pedagogical tools covering both Malay(ian) and Indonesian standards on an equal footing.