I've been thinking about the fact that in Malaysia, the upper middle class or the more highly educated tend to have a better grasp of the English language. When I first came to this conclusion, I felt like a snob: arrogant, conceited, thinking myself better than those of the less privileged socio-economic groups.
But it is a fact. In Word Play, Peter Farb draws the reader's attention to Pygmalion, the play on which the well-known musical My Fair Lady was based. The story goes that Professor Higgins, being somewhat of a snob himself, says of Eliza, a Cockney flower girl, "You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days." He proposes to pass her off successfully as a member of their class merely by teaching her how to speak standard English.
Of course she would need to dress differently, learn etiquette and all that other stuff, but speech was key. Because if she were to speak like a Cockney, she'd immediately be identified as one the minute she opened her mouth, and then she would look like nothing more than an imposter dressed up in fancy clothing.
And so linguistic barriers shore up the social barriers between the classes. This is interesting because over here, university graduates are said to have very poor mastery of standard English -- despite the fact that they are highly educated, have access to information, and have received opportunities others have not. Traditionally, education has been seen as the means of helping us to climb further up on the socio-economic ladder, become "somebody", and gain the ticket to a better life. "If you don't study hard, you'll end up sweeping the streets or becoming a garbage collector!" our parents used to say. Yet formal education seems to be failing us now.
In January this year, it was reported that one-third of those who graduated from local universities last year are not proficient in English. In December last year, Bloomberg reported that an estimated 45,000 college graduates are unemployed, mainly because of poor English (English is the lingua franca in the business and corporate sector). Yet instead of promoting the use of "proper" language, the popular media seem to be perpetuating the colloquial dialect, a state of affairs that has led to Zewt's rant. (Where I posted such long comments I decided I might as well write about this on my own blog!)
The thing is, I'm fortunate to come from a family that speaks English at home. The necessity of speaking English daily definitely honed my proficiency in the language. But if you think about it, the language we speak at home is a more colloquial variety, the casual form used in conversation between family and friends.
So, despite having the opportunity to practice speaking English all the time, I'd say that I most likely picked up standard English through reading and formal instruction provided in school. (Most of us do speak two forms of English, a colloquial form and the standard form, switching between them depending on the appropriateness of the situation.)
Why do others have such difficulty picking up standard English? I wouldn't blame the media. Apart from the failure of the education system, I'd attribute this to 1) not reading enough, and 2) not using the language.
To become proficient in a language, one has to use it often, or one will forget. Also, hearing or reading good English will sort of "condition" a person to recognise the right sort of grammar and sentence structures, to the point that he can subconsciously "sense" whether a sentence is right or wrong. Very few of us are aware of all the grammatical rules, but if we are proficient in the language, we can tell when something is not quite right.
The problem as I see it: birds of a feather tend to flock together. So the Mandarin-speaking friends tend to gather and speak Mandarin to each other, and likewise Malay friends tend to gather and speak Malay to each other. They only use English if they have to, for example if they are speaking to someone outside their circle. Thus they have very little practice in speaking English and are also not in a position to absorb and learn by listening to others speak.
I on the other hand tend to speak English with my friends, and therefore don't get the chance to practice Mandarin and Malay -- so my command of both those languages has gone down the drain. Essentially, I face the same problem, but mine is not as obvious because I rarely end up in situations which call for a good grasp of Mandarin or Malay... whereas English is used everywhere, every day, in the business world, so much so that if you cannot converse well in it, you end up handicapped.
