COMMENT | The politics of language

COMMENT | In Writing Against Neocolonialism, published in 1986, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o found himself grappling with the question of language, and the uncertainties about how literature was to be operationalised.

For while the works of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Sembene Ousmane, for instance, were incendiary and “assertive in tone . . . (about) Africa explaining itself, speaking for itself, and interpreting its past”, the languages that the writers used were often those of the former colonial languages, English, French or otherwise.

Political independence did not mean complete independence, whatever the case the former colonial master would retain its deep hold, not just of the economy but also in the intellectual sphere.

This has been a concern for generations of postcolonial writers and intellectuals, its heritage including those such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi. “For the African writer, the language he has chosen already has chosen his audience,” Ngũgĩ continues.

The solution to this, many reasoned as independence became less of a distant daydream and more of a reality, would perhaps be the reformulation and promotion of an indigenous language. And with this, the spectre of language control and planning forms the background to the ordinary discourse and conversations in daily life.

Debates over official languages and purity have been actively tied to the construction of the identity of the nation-state, particularly when it comes to constructing a new state from the means available, trying to follow-up successfully to what came before.

But independence cannot do away with the fraught uncertainties of the reliance on the metropole so easily. Even if political emancipation had been achieved, charting the young state’s own identity in relation to its reality is always a work-in-progress.

Similarly for Malaysia, the question of language is steeped in politics. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka would play a key role in an environment where the Malay language would ...