CLASSIFYING LANGUAGES
Languages may be classified in a number of ways, one of the most general being by family. Languages within a family share systems and structures that form the rules of language. Linguists group languages based on these similarities, which are the result of linguistic evolution from a limited number of original language stocks. At least six of the world's language stocks and families are represented in Malaysia. The classification of Malaysian languages into stocks and families provides a useful basis for examining their antiquity. Although some academic disagreement remains, the weight of opinion is that at some point all of the language stocks and families represented in what is now Malaysia arrived from outside the archipelago. Even more debate surrounds the origins of the individual languages themselves. Nevertheless, certain languages from the Austronesian and Austroasiatic stocks may be classified as indigenous to Malaysia.
Languages may also be grouped by typology. Malay and the languages of Sabah and Sarawak use affixes to form words, and are termed agglutinative, whereas the Chinese languages are tonal: different tones generate different meanings to a given word. The languages of India, meanwhile, are largely inflectional. They make use of affixes, and undergo changes in the shape of their words to derive new words.
Several writing systems are employed in Malaysia. Malay utilizes two writing systems: the Arabic-based Jawi and the more recent Roman (Rumi). In line with mainland China, the Chinese script has evolved from the complex classical form to the modern simplified Pinyin form. The Indian languages have many different scripts. The languages of Sabah and Sarawak and the Aslian languages of the Peninsula never developed indigenous written traditions. Perhaps partly as a result of this, a number of these languages have yet to be thoroughly researched.
Other less well-defined areas of classification are the many contact languages: a feature of a society comprising speakers of different first languages. Contact languages range from languages of wider communication to more established pidgins and creoles. Classificatory difficulties are compounded by the constantly shifting boundaries of these various speech forms. Indeed, the precise use of the term 'language' itself causes some difficulty; even linguists themselves sometimes interchange the use of the terms 'language' and 'dialect'. In this volume, where the distinction is indeterminate, the term 'speech variant' has been used.
Language usage in multilingual Malaysia is particularly complex. Basic academic classification techniques often cannot be applied. A key example of this is the tendency of Malaysians to 'code-switch', i.e. change language or dialect, sometimes frequently, in the course of a single communication, often within a single sentence.
