Taming Babel : language in the making of Malaysia /
Taming Babel sheds new light on the role of language in the making of modern postcolonial Asian nations. Focusing on one of the most linguistically diverse territories in the British Empire, Rachel Leow explores the profound anxieties generated by a century of struggles to govern the polyglot subjec...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge ; New York :
Cambridge University Press,
2016.
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| Summary: | Taming Babel sheds new light on the role of language in the making of modern postcolonial Asian nations. Focusing on one of the most linguistically diverse territories in the British Empire, Rachel Leow explores the profound anxieties generated by a century of struggles to govern the polyglot subjects of British Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia. The book ranges across a series of key moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which British and Asian actors wrought quiet battles in the realm of language, in textbooks and language classrooms, in dictionaries, grammars and orthographies, in propaganda and psychological warfare and in the very planning of language itself. Every attempt to tame Chinese and Malay languages resulted in failures of translation, competence and governance, exposing both the deep fragility of a monoglot state in polyglot milieux, and the essential untameable nature of languages in motion. |
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| Physical Description: | xx, 261 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-255) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781107148536 1107148537 9781316602607 1316602605 |