Indirectness Among the Malays

Indirectness Among the Malays In Malay culture, as in many other cultures of the world, good breeding is cultured through the way one relates oneself to other people in various forms. To able to speak in a way that accepted by society for various situations one has to know various rules. Malay has a set of sociolinguistic and cultural rules which spell out the do’s and don’t in language usage. Learners of Malay may find it easier to memorise the rules of using the affixes than the usage of pronouns and the honorifics. They will find that while a violation of grammatical rules is easily forgiven, it is not so if a similar thing were to happen with sociolinguistic rules. In traditional Malay life, Malay children were brought up to seen and not to be heard. They were taught to speak to elders only when spoken to. And even when they spoke they should not look up or look at the person speaking to them in the eyes, as this gesture was considered rude ( kurang ajar ). They should cast down their eyes or look slightly askance, as this was considered good breeding that came humility and knowing one’s place ( tahu diri ) vis-à-vis the other person. To complete the wellbred gesture, their verbalization should not have any indication of “directness”. That is to say, whatever they wanted to put across to other person should be done in an indirect way, whatever the intention was, and this was considered refined. I have so far identified four types of indirectness in communication among the Malays, and they are categorized according to manner by which each type is realized. These types are : beating about the bush, using imagery, saying the opposite of what one means, and using surrogate. The first three involve two parties in the speech events concerned: the speaker and the one spoken to, or the message giver and the message reciver. On the other hand, the last category necessitates the presence of three parties: the originator of the message, its communicator and its receiver. I ll discussed further in the next issue.