Part of the nation’s cultural heritage includes the hundreds of indigenous languages and dialects, some of which are in real danger of extinction within the next few decades.

On this day that is International Mother Tongue Day, FMT spoke to a language specialist as well as a Malaysian who understands the struggle and necessity of keeping an indigenous language alive.

After all, language can be a core part of a person’s identity and history.

According to Professor Dr Stefanie Pillai of University Malaya’s Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, there are an estimated 137 languages currently spoken in Malaysia.

These include languages that are indigenous to Sabah and Sarawak such as Iban, Kadazan and Bidayuh, and those that are indigenous to Peninsular Malaysia such as Semai, Temiar and Jakun.

“About 80% of these languages are indigenous languages, and most of them are in Sabah and Sarawak because there are so many sub-ethnic groups,” explains the professor.

To further elaborate on this, she cites the Bidayuh group as an instance where sub-groups in the Bidayuh community can have language variants that are not necessarily understood by others in the same wider Bidayuh community.

Christina Dripin Hinke, born and bred in Kuching and now living in Erfurt, Germany, relates her personal experience.

“Everyone in my family speaks Bidayuh and from the time of my birth, my parents had the understanding to make us actively bilingual,” says the 48-year-old former radio presenter.

“Though we spoke and still speak Bidayuh to my mom and English to my dad, my sisters and I have a mixed English-Bidayuh language.

“But Bidayuh was never learnt in a formal setting – only in aural and oral modes.”

She adds that it must be understood that there are officially three main types of Bidayuh languages – Serian, Bau and Biatah (which Hinke speaks).

“And even within this Biatah dialect, there are branches with minute differences in terminology and pronunciation. So, my dad is one type of Biatah and my mom another.”

Though Hinke valiantly tries to keep up with her own proficiency of Biatah-Bidayuh, she admits that continuing to the next generation, which includes her daughter, and her nieces and nephews in Canada, there is a limited Bidayuh vocabulary, mainly due to lack of practise – especially since she moved to Germany.

“But I fully intend for my daughter to continue understanding it even if she can’t speak it well. My niece and nephew in Kuching do understand and speak it, although only with my parents.”

There weren’t many Bidayuh books or written material to read from when Hinke was younger, and her main references were prayer books and the Bidayuh Bible.

However, she has brought with her a book, a Bidayuh vocabulary picture book compiled by the Dayak Bidayuh National Association, of which her sister was a part.

She also admits her concern that declining interest in and knowledge of the language may result in the purity of the language being diluted over time.

With Hinke being close to her fifties, she is part of a wider group of Malaysians that Pillai says will be responsible, at the very least within their own families, for preserving certain declining languages and dialects.

“If these languages are not preserved, they may die out when these generations die, so we may be looking at the next 20 years or so if successive generations do not speak these languages,” Pillai explains.

“Language is a carrier from one generation to another,” she relates, inasmuch as language is a supporting mechanism for certain traditions and rituals of any particular community, such as the potency of a Malay pantun which loses some of its nuanced meaning and beauty when translated into English.

The insufficiency of materials or even of native-language proficiency language teachers underlines part of the challenges in the preservation of a dying language or dialect, as Pillai outlines, for example, in the context of non-indigenous teachers in Orang Asli schools.

While Bahasa Malaysia (BM) – standard Malay – is the national language and the main medium of instruction in the public education sphere, there are still indigenous languages spoken among Malaysians in daily life and in millions of homes across Malaysia.

These also include dialects of BM, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and even other South-East Asian languages such as Javanese and Minangkabau.

BM has its various geographical and social varieties, too, such as Kelantan Malay, Northern/ or Kedah Malay and Perak Malay, which some more-urbanised younger generations may be less familiar with.

The multi-cultural diversity of Malaysia also includes other languages spoken in parts of the country, such as creole languages, including Baba Malay, Chitty Malay, and Malacca Portuguese.

And of course, there is the colloquial Malaysian English, Manglish, which provides for much entertainment and colour to locals and visitors alike.

Such is the amorphous beauty of language in its evolution, but it’s always good to pay tribute to the roots of any entity, especially one so central to life as language itself.