SHAH ALAM, April 19 — A language expert said today that every Malaysian must be made to be fluent in Bahasa Malaysia as this would help the country achieve national unity.
Datuk Dr Teo Kok Seong, Principal Fellow of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s Institute of Ethnic Studies (KITA), also claimed that allowing the usage of multiple languages in Malaysia is preventing the country’s unity.
“There is a theory that states that a country that only allows the usage of one language as its main language, that country will find it easier to unite its people.
“So we are a country that allows the usage of four languages as a main language and we can see how difficult it is to unite the people,” he told a forum organised by Malay daily Sinar Harian titled “Sampai Bila Mahu Rasis?”.
“So the lesson learnt here is that we can only prioritise the usage of one language only and that language is none other than our national language, Bahasa Malaysia,” he added.
Dr Raja Rajeswari Seetha Raman, a lecturer at the Teachers’ Training Institutes (IPG) Malay language campus, echoed the view, and said more should be done to strengthen the position of the Malay language in Malaysia.
“So we should maintain our diversity but at the same time we must strengthen the sovereignty of our national language because that is entrenched in our federal constitution.
“The language represents the personality of an individual,” she said during the forum.
Teo also agreed with calls to abolish vernacular schools and implement a single-stream education system, saying this was crucial to ensure national unity.
“Even in primary schools we have seven different streams. There are public schools, Chinese schools, Tamil schools, religious schools, private schools, Chinese independent schools, international schools and home schools.
These seven streams are what’s tearing us apart. So it’s time we only have one stream,” he said.
He said there should be a “1Malaysia school”, where students will continue to learn about the country’s different cultures and ethnicities.
Calls to end vernacular education resurfaced after participants of a pro-Malay rally held on September 16 last year demanded the government abolish Chinese and Tamil schools, which they claimed to promote “racist” tendencies.
To date, leaders of the Chinese component of the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, MCA, have voiced their protest against the message, noting that vernacular education is a right enshrined in the Constitution and that any attempt to abolish the system was illegal.
