Linguistic exclusion and outright discourtesy

Malaysians are a rude lot. I am sorry to have to say this about my fellow countrymen, but it's true.

Tonight, I was having dinner with my Dad at our usual favourite restaurant, Mama's Restaurant in Damansara Jaya. Sitting at the table next to us were three Malaysian Chinese men and a Caucasian. From the snatches of their conversation, I gather that the three Malaysians were managers of a company, and the Caucasian was either a colleague or supplier.

What really offended me was that the three oldsters were speaking among themselves in the Penang Hokkien dialect, while it was plain to see that their poor guest was feeling out-of-place and lost amidst the babble.

Now, don't get me wrong - I am a fan of the Penang Hokkien dialect, and made a special effort to learn it well during my 6-year stint in Penang. But it was obvious that the three men were fluent in English. And how do I know that? Simple: Not only did they speak good English to their guest, their Penang Hokkien was peppered with English words here-and-there, and their Hokkien vocabulary was limited - a tell-tale sign that they were not Chinese-educated.

So, why did they have to be so discourteous as to deliberately use Hokkien and exclude their guest from the conversation? It was clear to me that what they were talking about was nothing more than idle chat (I was not eavesdropping; their voices were booming).

No, I have to write this off as blatant discourtesy towards foreign visitors. Call me disloyal or unpatriotic towards my roots, but I think when you are entertaining foreign guests, and you have no problem speaking a language that your guest understands, it is only polite that such a common language be used.

Newspapers with grammatical errors!

It's official. The standard of the English Language in Malaysia is going to the dogs. And you know it is beyond hope, when even the newspapers have glaring grammatical errors.

Without naming the newspaper in question, I cite two glaring errors:

1. "Daughter pinning for dad". I am trying to imagine the poor girl pinning her dad on the wall. It's pining, not pinning. Mind you, this was on the headlines, not in the text itself.

2. "... comprising more than 800 stalls maybe an attractive shopping destination...". Can somebody please tell the writer that there is a difference between "maybe" (one word) and "may be" (two words). Perhaps the writer was trying to reduce the character count for the article, and a space counts as one character.

There was a time when teachers used to encourage students to read the newspapers as a way to improve their English. The advice is still sound, but I think it is best that the teachers qualify the advice with the proviso that they avoid the local newspapers like a plague!