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  3. Taming Babel
  • Cited by 43
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      05 July 2016
      14 July 2016
      ISBN:
      9781316563007
      9781107148536
      9781316602607
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316563007
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.54kg, 280 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (229 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.43kg, 282 Pages
      • Subjects:
      East Asian History, Area Studies, Asian Studies, History, South-East Asian History
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    Subjects:
    East Asian History, Area Studies, Asian Studies, History, South-East Asian History
    Information

    Book description

    Taming Babel sheds new light on the role of language in the making of modern postcolonial Asian nations. Focusing on one of the most linguistically diverse territories in the British Empire, Rachel Leow explores the profound anxieties generated by a century of struggles to govern the polyglot subjects of British Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia. The book ranges across a series of key moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which British and Asian actors wrought quiet battles in the realm of language: in textbooks and language classrooms; in dictionaries, grammars and orthographies; in propaganda and psychological warfare; and in the very planning of language itself. Every attempt to tame Chinese and Malay languages resulted in failures of translation, competence, and governance, exposing both the deep fragility of a monoglot state in polyglot milieux, and the essential untameable nature of languages in motion.

    Awards

    Winner, 2018 Harry J. Benda Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies

    Reviews

    'Rachel Leow has written a timely book with an elegance necessary for the tangled cords that characterise the language policies in colonial and postcolonial Malaysia.'

    Alicia Izharuddin Source: New Books Asia (www.newbooks.asia)

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    Contents

    Contents
    • 1 - The Technocrats
      pp 23-56
    • Challenges of Governance in a Polyglot Society
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