Of 3 years working as a recruiter, I’ve been making hundreds, or even thousands of calls, meeting and speaking with lots of candidates or clients from various background, I realized that our Malaysian language is some kind unique and it’s consider a bit of distinctively culture in our country.
Manglish, the Malaysian English, also known as Bahasa Rojak in our country, it’s divided into 2 versions:
- the East Coast version – combination of English + Malay. Widely use in Kelantan/Terengganu
- the West Coast version – myriad of English + Chapalang Chinese dialects(eg. Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka…)
P/S : Chapalang – mixture of variety
And surprisingly, I found that the Chapalang Manglish is not only used by Mandarin/Chinese speakers but fully understood by various races or other language speakers, and it has been widely use among our country’s nations in our daily communication.
Let’s take a look at how these casual junk words(cast with various intonations) insinuate different meanings when we suffixing sentences with our lah, leh, loh, meh…
Being a Malaysian is really so interesting lah !
Because we’re able to learn multi languages and culture mah…