Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Malaysian English Monophthongs by Regional Malay Dialect Speakers: Convergence or Divergence?
Full text linkThis study investigates the possible influence of Malay regional dialects on Malaysian English monophthongs. It compares the production of Malay and English monophthongs by male and female speakers of Standard Malay, Terengganu Malay and Kelantan Malay. Formant and Euclidean distance measurements show that although there are significant variations in Malay monophthong production, the speakers’ English monophthongs tend to converge spectrally. Two second language phonology theories are used to explain the results
The Development of Plural Expressions in a Malay-English Bilingual Child
Full text linkIn a postcolonial country such as Malaysia, English plays an important role in governance, education and popular culture. With English now becoming the lingua franca of the globalised world, many Malaysian urban families use English to speak to their children at home, in conjunction with the Malay language or other ethnic languages. Recognising the important relationship between the two languages, this paper investigates early bilingual development of Malay and English focusing specifically on the development of plural marking in a child raised simultaneously in these typologically distant languages. These two languages express plurals differently: Malay through various forms of reduplication and English by morphological marking on nouns. But how does the child manage to learn, simultaneously, such divergent systems? In order to shed some light on this question, a bilingual child growing up in these two languages was audio- and video- recorded in each language over 6 months, that is from 3 years 4 months (3;4) to 3 years 10 months (3;10). Results suggest that though the child appeared to develop two distinct systems of plurality in Malay and English, the two developing systems also manifested considerable cross-linguistic influence in both directions. Implications for the study of world Englishes are discussed
Muslim Women in South India: Reading Selected Narratives of Sara Aboobacker
Full text linkThis paper explores the narratives of Sara Aboobacker (1936-), a prolific South Indian Muslim woman writer. In her thirty years of literary production, Aboobacker’s narratives showcase female characters from the South Indian Muslim community and highlight the varied experiences and the multiple identities they possess in a multicultural society. This study relies on the term “Muslimwoman†coined by Miriam Cooke whereby she homogenises Muslim women all over the world. The study proposes that undifferentiating the female experiences of Muslim women as suggested by Cooke requires a more refined categorisation incorporating the heterogeneous identity of Muslim women especially in multicultural societies. The current reading attempts to address this concern with a two-part discussion of Aboobacker’s narratives. The first part focuses on the three primary religious concepts of talaq or divorce, polygamy and purdah, and conveys that though Aboobacker’s female characters are situated in a local environment, their concerns mirror some of the issues pertinent to Muslim women around the world. The second part problematises the gendered, inter-ethnic and inter-religious connections in Aboobacker’s works through which she constructs the heterogeneous identity and experience of South Indian Muslim women parallel to the female issues of all downtrodden classes in a multicultural society like India. We contend that while Aboobacker’s narratives provide us with an insight into the ways in which South Indian Muslim women navigate various pathways that demonstrate the magnitude of their challenges in integrating multiple identities, they should also be recognised for showcasing perennial, universal challenges relating to Muslim women’s rights globally
Un/productive Raciality and Transnational Affiliations in Lydia Kwa’s Pulse
Full text linkThis paper explores the intersections that develop as Canada and Singapore redefine the terms of their productive raciality through their respective multicultural/multiracial forms in order to remain globally competitive. It draws out these intersections as they appear in Lydia Kwa’s Pulse (2010) through its engagement with the limits of “productive†raciality and the desires of the sexual racial body. Set both in Singapore and Canada, Pulse explores the everyday experiences of the particular figurations that are bracketed out through the rhetoric of productive raciality in both nations – including the Asianfication of Canada’s identity and Singapore’s use of “Asianism†as part of their global multicultural identities. As Pulse considers the effects of these states’ failure to facilitate frameworks that would make ostensibly “unproductive†transnational figurations legible to others, it also draws out new affiliations between these bodies subjected to these effects across these distinct contexts
English in Myanmar: Usage of English Adjective Phrases by Burmese and Rohingya Bloggers
Full text linkMyanmar is unique in that it was a country colonised by Britain, but its current post-colonial linguistic situation suggests that it is in Kachru’s Expanding Circle rather than the Outer Circle. The lack of stable use of English, however, does not mean there is neither an underlying system nor a set of discernible characteristics to describe the variety. This paper is an attempt to describe a structural aspect of the English used by Myanmarese speakers. It presents an investigation of English adjective phrases used by the Burmese and the Rohingya, two ethnic groups in Myanmar whose mother tongues belong to different language families. Adjective phrases from forty blog articles were analysed in order to identify their forms and functions, as well as similarities and differences between the two groups. Findings indicate that adjective phrases with adverb modifiers were the most frequently used form by both Burmese and Rohingya speakers. There is evidence to show that the forms and functions of the adjective phrases were influenced by the speakers’ first languages. Other factors such as educational background and register may have also played a role
Voicing the Unspeakable: Indian Daughters Writing Mothers
Full text linkIndian society has traditionally glorified the mother as the silent and submissive producer of sons. In the context of hegemonic patriarchal discourse, the motherdaughter relationship has been an “unspeakable plot†(Hirsch 1). Yet mothers have always shaped their daughters’ identities through their own sacrifices and resistances. In this paper, I have examined the contours of the mother-daughter plot through two texts by Indian daughters/writers: Mai: A Novel by Geetanjali Shree (1997; translated from Hindi by Nita Kumar, 2000), and the “biography-novel†Diddi: My Mother’s Voice by Ira Pande (2005). Although both texts are located in middle class, upper caste families in North India, the mothers respond to patriarchal subjugation in contrasting ways. These texts challenge and subvert patriarchy at various levels: by reasserting the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship; by narrating stories of maternal resistances within and outside the family; by articulating the ambivalences felt by daughters and their consciousness of progressive empowerment; by examining the problematic relationship between procreativity and creativity; by unpacking the social construct of motherhood through the prism of the daughters’ representations; and by tracing the formation of the “motherline†(Lowinsky 1) which creates, values and transmits enabling maternal legacies. Using the methodologies of comparative textual analysis and feminist psychoanalysis, I have attempted to rediscover the “matronymic†that is “blanked out by the patronymic†in the family plot (Gilbert and Gubar 378) as narrated by daughters writing their mothers in India