Some peculiarities of Malaysian Iyer English

This paper discusses some peculiarities of Malaysian English as spoken by Malaysian Iyers. Previous research showed that Malaysian Iyers, a minority group of Tamils living in Malaysia, had shifted from their mother tongue of Tamil to English mainly, though Tamil was used functionally (Sankar 2004). The study was conducted on 15 Malaysian Iyers who were audio taped in natural situations to study the linguistic patterns that emerged from their use of English. Approximately 120 minutes of audio taped data was analyzed by examining code switches made from English to Tamil. These switches were examined to find out if English grammar was applied to these switches. The findings showed that the respondents' use of the English language included Tamil words that were grammaticized into the English language through devices such as the inclusion of English suffixes such as the plural ‘s’, ‘-fy, ‘-en’ or the prefixes such as ‘un-’ and ‘de-’. Tamil verbs were also found to be conjugated to the past tense through the use of ‘-ed’ or the present continuous of ‘-ing’. These words appear to have become part of their English repertoire

Code-switching · First language · Grammar · Linguistics · Plural · Prefix · Sociology · Tamil · History · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology

• Code-switching for a purpose

  Kevin Kwok-Yin Cheng, Karen Kow Yip Cheng•Multilingua•2003

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