Malaysian English

This book is a corpus-based study of contemporary Malaysian English. It demonstrates the ways in which Malaysian English has changed as a result of contact with Malay and Chinese languages. It suggests that those variations and changes are the results of the communal acquisition and the maintenance of English by a multilingual community.

Malaysian English: Language Contact and Change is a corpus-based study of contemporary Malaysian English. Based on linguistic features extracted from the Malaysian English Newspaper Corpus, this study demonstrates the diverse ways in which Malaysian English has changed as a result of contact with Malay and Chinese languages. The interactions between groups of speakers who are dominant in English and those who are dominant in Malay or Chinese have resulted in wide-ranging changes in Malaysian English. Multilingual individuals who juggle several languages in their daily communications have also shaped the structure of this variety. This volume suggests that variation and change in Malaysian English are the results of both the communal acquisition and the maintenance of English by a multilingual community.

Autorentext

Siew Imm Tan is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests include language contact, New Englishes, corpus-based lexicography, and 19th-century Singapore and Malayan English.

Klappentext

Malaysian English: Language Contact and Change is a corpus-based study of contemporary Malaysian English. Based on linguistic features extracted from the Malaysian English Newspaper Corpus, this study demonstrates the diverse ways in which Malaysian English has changed as a result of contact with Malay and Chinese languages. The interactions between groups of speakers who are dominant in English and those who are dominant in Malay or Chinese have resulted in wide-ranging changes in Malaysian English. Multilingual individuals who juggle several languages in their daily communications have also shaped the structure of this variety. This volume suggests that variation and change in Malaysian English are the results of both the communal acquisition and the maintenance of English by a multilingual community.

Zusammenfassung
«Overall, the study is an important addition to Malaysian English studies, and exemplifies how contact-induced changes can be accounted for in postcolonial Englishes. The book will be of interest to scholars of varieties of English, particularly those focusing on Southeast Asia. More generally, the book is of relevance to contact linguistics as well as scholars working at the intersection of language and culture.» (Steffen Schaub, The Linguist List, 18 November 2014)

Inhalt
Contents: Malaysian English Historical Background Malaysian English Newspaper Corpus Lexical Borrowing Lexical Creation Group Second Language Acquisition Reclassification of Common Nouns Multi-word Verbs Lexical Variation Theoretical Model of Contact-induced Change Influences of Malay and Chinese.