Taming Babel
Language in the Making of Malaysia

Through a study of Malaysia, Taming Babel examines how empires and postcolonial nation-states struggle to govern multilingual and polyglot subjects.

Rachel Leow (Author)

9781316602607, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 March 2018

281 pages, 2 maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.43 kg

'Rachel Leow has written a timely book with an elegance necessary for the tangled cords that characterise the language policies in colonial and postcolonial Malaysia.' Alicia Izharuddin, New Books Asia (www.newbooks.asia)

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.

Introduction
Part I. The Colonial State: 1. The technocrats: challenges of governance in a polyglot society
2. The knowledge producers: taming sounds, scripts and selves
Part II. Word Wars: 3. The lexicographers: dictionaries and the making of postwar politics
4. The propagandists: public relations, psychological warfare and the making of the influential state
Part III. The Postcolonial State: 5. The language planners: Dewan Bahasa in the invention and constriction of the postcolonial nation-state
Postscript
Appendices
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Asian history [HBJF], Language: history & general works [CBX]