[Foundation-l] The problem with native languages vs. the lingua franca

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Amir E. Aharoni<amir.aharoni at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am not quite sure that *all* Malay parents, teachers and professors
> are very unhappy. The natural condition of any person around the world
> is to prefer their own language and to the best of my knowledge,
> there's nothing inherent in the Malay language that makes it less
> useful than English for teaching math (there could be - see
> [[Piraha]]). English can and should be taught separately as a foreign
> language, simply because it is, indeed, a useful lingua franca around
> the world, but all local languages should be equally respected and
> promoted among their speakers.

There is no doubt that education in native language is very important.
At the other side, ethnolinguistic situation in Malaysia (and
especially in Indonesia) is very complex. It may be compared with the
situation in India, when authorities tried to remove English as one of
the official languages and to impose Hindi as the sole federal
language.

You described just one category of linguistic situations: when
technologically dominant group is trying to impose their language to a
native population. All dominant Western language had or have such
situations.

However, at the most of the planet, there are no doubts between
dominant global language and a native one, but between dominant global
and dominant regional/local language. I don't know numbers for
Malaysia ([[Languages of Malaysia]] is almost a stub), but I may
guarantee that Malaysian language for significant part of the
population is not a native language. Or, like in Singapore,
significant part of population knows at native or almost-native level
at least three languages (typical situation may be: Malaysian, English
and native language, which may be a distinctive dialect of Malaysian,
too).

At last, as I pointed before, not knowing English is a significant
handicap for one scientist, even in social sciences. In 20-30 years
the situation will be different, but, we are living and working now,
not in 20-30 years.