Taming Babel
eBook - PDF

Taming Babel

Language in the Making of Malaysia

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Taming Babel

Language in the Making of Malaysia

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Taming Babel by Rachel Leow in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Asian History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-title
  3. Title page
  4. Copyright information
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. Table of contents
  8. Preface
  9. Note on the Text
  10. List of abbreviations
  11. Introduction
  12. Part I The Colonial State
  13. Part II Word Wars
  14. Part III The Postcolonial State
  15. Appendix 1: ‘Pseudo-Malay Terms’
  16. Appendix 2: Malay Slang in Chinese Communist Propaganda
  17. Glossary
  18. Bibliography
  19. Index