Nala H. Lee - A Grammar of Modern Baba Malay

Mouton Grammar Library [MGL]

Edited by

Volume

ISBN 9783110744927

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110745061

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110745153

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Baba Malay (ISO 639-3: mbf), also known as Peranakan to its speakers, is an Austronesian-based contact language with a Sinitic substrate that is spoken by the Chinese Peranakans in Southeast Asia. The language was formed via early intermarriages of Hokkien traders from China and indigenous women in the region. While the term Peranakan is an endonym used by the community, researchers have commonly used the term Baba Malay. The language is highly endangered, with less than 1,000 speakers in Malacca (a state within Malaysia) and less than 1,000 speakers in Singapore. There are also Baba Malay speakers who live outside of these regions, such as in the Malaysian capital state of Kuala Lumpur and in Australia, but their number is far fewer than those who reside in Malacca and Singapore.

In the past, it has been suggested that Baba Malay is a dialect of Malay with heavy borrowing from Hokkien, a variety of Southern Min, in terms of both lexical and grammatical structures (). The view that Baba Malay might be a nativized version of Bazaar Malay can also be discarded if one bears in mind that the historical development of Bazaar Malay has never been linked to any specific community of speakers (Ansaldo 2009: 60).

In more recent literature, Baba Malay has been characterized as a creole, given its emergence and expansion as part of a hybrid culture (). For example, the word for window, menjla is derived from Portuguese janela, and the word for money, duit originated as the coin of the Dutch East Indies. The main bulk of the lexicon is conspicuously Malay in nature. Grammatically, while some structures are distinctly derived from the substrate language Hokkien, including the adversative passive construction (Section 5.2.3), and the benefactive and causative constructions (Section 5.2.4.2), Baba Malay has a complex system that incorporates grammatical characteristics of both its component languages. This is exemplified in its aspectual system, which integrates structures that are directly derived from Malay (including the sudah perfective structure, the baru recent perfect structure, and the pernah experiential perfect structure) and Hokkien (including reduplication for the tentative aspect andrelexified structures for the perfective, progressive, experiential perfect, and habitual functions originating from Hokkien possessive verb u) (Section 5.2.5). As a separate case in point, the languages relativization strategies have also been derived from the grammatical subsystems of both component languages, with prenominal relativization originating from Hokkien and postnominal relativization originating from Malay (Section 5.6.3). All that being said, this grammar necessarily treats the contact language as a coherent complex language system in its own right, rather than viewing it as a sum of its component languages, which might inadvertently promote the view that contact languages are simple or simply some variety of its component languages.

The varieties of Baba Malay in Malacca and Singapore bear a large similarity with each other, except for differences that are mostly lexical resulting from a more dominant Malay influence in Malacca. The variety of Baba Malay in Singapore shows greater Hokkien influence. For example, while Hokkien-derived huahi can be used to express the notion of happy in Singapore Baba Malay, Baba Malay speakers in Malacca use Malay-derived gembira or suka hati literally: like heart to express a similar concept ( showed that the writers had some command of the substrate language, Hokkien, and the superstrate language, Malay, choosing to use lexical and functional features from these languages optionally when writing in Baba Malay (Lee in prep). It is rarer for Baba Malay speakers today, particularly in Singapore, to speak these component languages, with English being a much more dominant home language amongst them (see Sections 2.5 and 6.4). Therefore, whereas early language records are distinguished by a more typical language contact continuum, the variety of Baba Malay that is captured by this grammar is notably a more stable variety.

A brief overview of Baba Malays typology is provided in this section. The overview includes notes on the languages vowel and consonant inventories, morphology, word order, argument alignment and case.

Baba Malay has eight phonemic vowels, and its vowel inventory is as follows in .

Table 1: The vowel inventory of Baba Malay.

.

There is some affixation in Baba Malay. All of its affixes are derived from Malay, in which the corresponding affixes are obligatory (Alternatively, menangis can be used in the context of (1) and nangis can be used in the context of (2) to express the same notions.

Very few affixes are obligatory. The only two affixes that are more commonly used are the prefix, ter- accidental, movement, and the transitivizing suffix -kan. The different usages of ter- are shown in (4) and (5), and these examples can be compared to (3), where ter- is not affixed on the verb. In (6), the verb jatoh to fall is intransitive, whereas it is made transitive with the affixation of -kan in (7).