KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 22 — Stricter guidelines will be issued on the use of the Malay language for road signs across the country, Housing and Local Government Minister Zuraida Kamaruddin said today.
“We will review the matter and come out with more strict guidelines. We have guidelines over the use of language for advertisement boards, but that is different from road signs,” she said in a report by The Star today.
The minister was responding to queries at a press conference about several road signs in Pekan Subang that had Chinese characters in light of the recent move of the Selangor government to use only Malay for road signs in Shah Alam.
Zuraida said in the report that the specific Malay nouns and names used for road signs could make it harder to translate accurately into other languages.
“We have to further expose the use of Bahasa Malaysia among the rakyat, and I am quite sure almost every Malaysian understands Malay,” she was quoted in the report.
The Sultan of Selangor Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah had issued a decree last week for all road signs in Shah Alam in both Malay and Chinese languages be replaced with those that used only the national language.
The road signs were to be replaced before the Sultan’s 73rd birthday on December 11.
