Taming Babel ：Language in the Making of Malaysia

Publication subTitle ：Language in the Making of Malaysia

Author： Rachel Leow

Publisher： Cambridge University Press‎

Publication year： 2016

E-ISBN: 9781316668948

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9781107148536

Subject： K3 Asian History

Keyword：亚洲史

Language： ENG

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Taming Babel

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.

Chapter

List of abbreviations

Introduction

In the Beginning

Babel in Southeast Asia

Chaining the Winds

Crisis and Opportunity

Part I The Colonial State

1 The Technocrats

Introduction

The Early Days of British Rule

The Language Technocracy

Commanding Languages in the Courts of Law

Who Commands the Language Commanders?

Deficiencies Abound

Conclusion

2 The Knowledge Producers

Introduction

Manuscript to Print

Sound to Script

Looseness to Fixity

A Guided Development

Conclusion

Part II Word Wars

3 The Lexicographers

Introduction

Occupational Hazards

Language Liberators?

The Window of the Word

The Making of a Lexicographer

‘A Whole Universe of Judgments’

Conclusion

4 The Propagandists

Introduction

The Technologies of the Influential State

The Linguistic Crisis: An Information Panic in the Making

Implausible Speakers: The Postwar Fate of the Language Technocracy

Plausible Speakers: Communist Oral Propaganda

Conclusion

Part III The Postcolonial State

5 The Language Planners

Introduction

House of Language

Fighting English: The Indictment of the Colonial Past

Fighting Multilingualism: The Indictment of the ‘Malayan’

Fighting Hybridity: The Indictment of Babel

Conclusion

Appendix 1: ‘Pseudo-Malay Terms’

Appendix V

Pseudo-Malay Terms Used in Many Indonesian Periodicals

Appendix 2: Malay Slang in Chinese Communist Propaganda

Glossary

Bibliography

Abbreviations Used in Notes

Unpublished Primary Sources

British Library (BL)

Malay Concordance Project (MCP)

National University of Singapore (NUS) Library

Rhodes House Library (RHL)

School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Special Collections

Singapore National Archives (SNA)

Government Records

Oral History Archives (OHA)

Singapore National Library (SNL)

The National Archives, London (TNA)

University Library, Cambridge (UL)

Published Primary Sources

Periodicals

Dictionaries and Grammars

Official Reports

Secondary Sources

Index

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