To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
First of all I should like to express my deepest appreciation for your invitation to participate in the discussions at this Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association. It is indeed a great honor you have extended to my country in inviting me to speak to such a distinguished gathering. It is, however, an honor which I have accepted with some hesitancy. As a layman in the field of linguistics I know that I am not the right person to address an association of scholars. Moreover, my desire to make a somewhat valuable contribution to these discussions has been greatly handicapped by the lack of source material and reference books which I wished to consult but which are not presently available in Washington.
This chapter outlines the relationship between Bahasa Indonesia and Malay (Bahasa Melayu), the official languages of the modern states of Indonesia and Malaysia. We trace the historical development of these two varieties of Malay from their classical source, Malay, before the advent of government by the colonial powers, and focus our discussion on factors resulting in the divergence that is visible today. We also discuss efforts to standardize the two postindependence languages, including the language policies adopted by the major Malay-speaking countries in the region. The chapter analyzes the differences between Bahasa Indonesia and Malay in terms of vocabulary and grammatical structure and advances certain hypotheses for some of the major remaining differences. Given the geopolitical proximity of Brunei and Singapore we cannot but include what happens to Malay there.
The national language of Indonesia is originally called Malay, which is a minority language in the Indonesian archipelago. Why was this minority language eventually chosen as the national language of Indonesia? This chapter deals with the origin of the Indonesian national language and its development from 1928 to the Reformasi (Reform) period. It also examines Indonesian policy towards the national language and its relationships with nation-building. However, globalization and revival of ethnicity are two factors which may serve as challenges to the national language policy. This paper will therefore also discuss problems and prospects of such a policy.
THE ROLE OF THE MALAY LANGUAGE PRIOR TO INDONESIA'S INDEPENDENCE
Indonesia is a multiethnic and multilingual society, of which the largest ethnic group is Javanese (47 per cent according to the 1930 population census). Nevertheless, the Javanese language was not selected as the national language of Indonesia. One of the reasons was that Javanese is a complicated language which has also been used only by the Javanese. Besides, the language is hierarchical; it is divided into high Javanese and low Javanese, which should be used in accordance with the position of the person in society, therefore it is non-democratic. The languages of other ethnic groups, for instance, the Sundanese (14.5 per cent according to the 1930 population census) and Madurese (7 per cent according to the 1930 population census), were not used by others either. Only the language of the Malays, who constituted about 1.6 per cent according to the 1930 census (see Table 3.1), was used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago. Different ethnic groups when they met used this language to communicate.
Because of the above reasons, during the nationalist movement of Indonesia, which started in the first decade of the twentieth century, the language used among the nationalists was Malay. All the newspapers read by Indonesian political public were published in this language rather than in vernacular languages (often known in Indonesian as bahasa daerah, or regional languages).
The Singapore Mental Health Survey was undertaken to establish the prevalence of mental disorders in Singapore. This necessitated translation of several modules of the WHO's Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) into Bahasa Melayu. The aim in translation was to achieve a conceptually equivalent version to the original instrument. The translation procedure was a four-step process: 1) forward translation, 2) expert panel review, 3) pre-test and cognitive interview and 4) development of the final version. The translation procedure was effective in identifying and resolving translation problems, and adapting the language of the instrument to suit the local Malay-speaking population. We recommend this four-step process for future studies to attain a fair representation of minority groups in nation-wide studies.
Many stroke research trials do not include assessment of cognitive function. A Very Early Rehabilitation Trial (AVERT) is an international multicenter study that includes the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) as an outcome. At the Malaysian AVERT site, completion of the MoCA has been limited by low English proficiency in some participants. We aimed to develop a Bahasa Malaysia (BM) version of the MoCA and to validate it in a stroke population.
Methods:
The original English version of the MoCA was translated into BM and then back-translated to ensure accuracy. Feasibility testing in a group of stroke patients prompted minor changes to the BM MoCA. In the validation phase, a larger group of bilingual stroke patients completed both the original English MoCA and the finalized BM MoCA, with presentation order counter-balanced.
Results:
Forty stroke patients participated, with a mean age of 57.2 (SD = 10.3). Agreement between BM MoCA and English MoCA was strong (intra-class correlation coefficient = 0.81, 95% CI 0.68–0.90). Scores on BM MoCA were slightly higher than scores on English MoCA (median absolute difference = 2.0, IQR 0–3.5), and this difference was present regardless of which version was completed first.
Conclusions:
The existence of a validated BM version of the MoCA will be of major benefit to clinicians and researchers in Malaysia and the wider South-east Asian region, where the Malay language is used by over 200 million people.