Passion and Language

Passion really changes things. To do something mediocre or ordinary and do it with passion will make people forget that it was ordinary in the first place.

Today we had a guest lecturer from Cambridge come speak at my sociolinguistics class on some aspects of language change. It was a warm day, and I had just been doing a cross-country in my uni (I must've walked from one end to the other and then some), yes I am ashamed to say I lost my way again after having been at uni for almost 3 years now, and had to rely on the GPS to get to my destination. Next time, I won't try to be smart and use shortcuts to unfamiliar places. Anyway, as I was saying, it was a warm day and I was nodding off in class during her lecture, but when it got to the Q&A part, well, let's just say I found it really interesting because she was just so passionate about the topics she does. That's what I like about some professors here, they might teach you boring stuff, but ask them about something related to their research and they immediately become very animated about their work.

Passion really plays a big deal, because her passion in the subject of language death and revitalisation got me interested in it as well. Which got me thinking about my own language: Bahasa Malaysia. I remember those times in school where we would complain about learning all our subjects in BM, because "it's a useless language, we won't be using it in the 'real world'". But in all honesty, I have to say that more than once, I was thankful that our education system forced me to learn BM for 11 years. Especially here in New Zealand, where a lot of people only speak one language: English. I think, coming from Malaysia where it's so multiracial, we take being bilingual, or even trilingual and so on, for granted because it's fairly common. Most people I know speak at least two different languages. Even a 'banana' like me is able to understand a bit of mandarin, and canto, and hokkien. And it helps so much in the Linguistics field to know another language to compare and understand your language better. Also, I just only found out that I HAD to take a foreign language paper to major in Linguistics. But since my academic advisor knows I know BM, I am exempted from it. Although, had I known about that earlier, I would've chosen to do like, German or French.

So, in today's class, we had a scenario of a native Maori Speaker who when doing Maori in school (they have to take Maori as a second language in schools here), didn't get high marks because his dialect of Maori was not the same as the standard Maori they teach in schools. Which got me thinking, no one actually uses the BM we learn at school, except for schoolkids who have to pass their exams, and politicians. Right? I mean, native BM speakers usually have their own dialect or use short forms while speaking it. Of course, the main structure of the language remains the same, but let's be honest here... the BM that we learnt at school is so rigid and weird to use in normal day-to-day conversation. At the moment, I'm learning a bit of Kelantanese malay because we're performing a dikir barat for our Malam Malaysia. And, it's tough enough for me to memorise something in BM, let alone in BM that doesn't even sound half like the one I'm used to. Like I still haven't figured out what "atah jula moktey" means. Does anyone know?

Anyway, just a little bit of a geeky post here. People ask me what I do in Linguistics, well, here's a little bit of what I do.