The Nature of Sinitic Lexicon in Bazaar Malay and Baba Malay in Singapore

Abstract

Voluntary or involuntary, human migration is fundamental to Asian history and to the world in general. Wherever people migrate, they introduce their languages, cultures, religions and beliefs to the host communities. Chinese emigration to other countries started as early as 1000 CE. From the midnineteenth century, their migration to other countries has resulted in more than 30 million so-called “Overseas Chinese”, who live outside mainland China and include over 20 million people in Southeast Asia (Lockard 2013), affecting the world’s demographics, economy, culture, and language, just to name a few. In terms of population, according to Hay (2008), ethnic Chinese range between 0.8% and 76% of the population of each Southeast Asian nation. These numbers do not take into consideration partially assimilated Chinese in these communities. Ethnic Chinese make up 34% of the population (6 million) in Malaysia and 76% (2 million) in Singapore, the majority of whom are descendants of Hokkien speakers present since the early days of Singapore. Economic dominance of the Chinese is felt in countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. As pointed out by Hays (2008), the economies are mostly controlled by rich Chinese in these countries. Migration also set the stage for immigrant Chinese and host communities, who spoke a range of different languages, to communicate and interact. This required the people involved to tap into the full repertoire of languages at their disposal. As noted by the mainland Chinese novelist Wang Anyi 王安憶 in the context of Singapore and Malaysia, but equally valid for other Southeast Asian countries, “Hua people must endure speaking the language of another ethnic group” (Ng 2013: 84). Explicit or implicit lexical borrowing between the languages involved in such processes is one of the most common consequences of contact, and has been observed in all world languages (Hoffer 2005). The Loanword Typology Project, coordinated by Haspelmath and Tadmor between 2004 and 2008, looked at loanwords in 41 world languages. Based on these findings, Tadmor (2009) ranks English among the “high borrowers” with 40%