Muarian Mandarin 麻坡的華語

Yesterday a friend sent me a youtube link containing a hilarious rap MTV entitled 麻坡的華語 (Muarian Mandarin).

The entire song of this MTV is sung in the Muarian Mandarin as well as Teochew and Hokkien, hence the title. Muar is a town located in northwestern Johor, Malaysia. Muarian Mandarin is a regional variety of Malaysian Mandarin.

My father is actually from Muar and I been there for many times, most of the scenes depicted in the MTV are familiar to me.

As the song indicates, Muarian Mandarin is unique in its own ways, but mostly remains intelligible to speakers of other Malaysian Mandarin varieties. It has its own non standard vocabulary, pronunciation and idioms. Muarian Mandarin contains lexical items from Malay, English, and various Chinese topolects especially Hokkien and Teochew.

These loan words like kaki (member, buddy, literally means ‘leg’ in Malay), kopi (coffee in Malay), taxi (from English), 西北 sibeh (a Hokkien slang that means ‘very’, cf. vachement in français familier, equivalent to ‘bloody’ or ‘damn’ in English) will definitely irritate language purists.

In the song it is mentioned that:

語言沒有標準性，只有地方性

我不相信 你很了解這個道理

(There is no standardization in language, only regional varieties, I don’t think you understand this very well)

Actually I do understand it.

A standard language is a particular variety of a language that achieves legal or quasi-legal status, considered as ‘educated’, ‘prestige’ and ‘superior’ in social contexts. However, it should be mentioned that no language variety is more ‘superior’ to another from a linguistic point of view. Standard language has gone through the codification process, has its own prescriptive grammatical and dictionary corpus, used in educational and official purposes. Non standard language, like Muarian Mandarin, has not progress to this phase; therefore it is often considered as ‘inferior’ but looked at linguistic system, both standard and non standard languages have the same characteristics.

One of the functions of a language, other than to communicate is to establish identity. Regional variety often associate with the identity of the speaker of that region, as long as the speakers defend this identity (as indicated by the phrase 西北滿意 "bloody satisfied" and 不要害怕自己的文化 沒有定義 "don't be afraid your culture does not have any identity" in the song), ranting of language purists will remain futile.

The Muarian Mandarin MTV can be found in this link:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=6M8fnjPLx6k

(Warning: contains racial and sexual vulgarity that might be offensive)