South-East and East Asia
From the Anglophone point of view South-East Asia consists of Singapore, Malaysia, The Philippines and Hong Kong (see separate modules on the last two of these). The types of English spoken here again depend on such factors as the degree of education and the substrate influence of background languages. In Malaysia the native language Malay plays an important role, as do Indian languages and Chinese in Singapore and Chinese, in particular its southern forms, in Hong Kong.
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English in Malaysia
The Federdation of Malaysia consists of (i) West Malaysia, or Peninsular Malaysia, on the Asian mainland, forming the southern part of the Malay peninsula, south of Thailand, but excluding Singapore at the tip and (ii) East Malaysia, or Malaysian Borneo, on the northern coast of the large island of Borneo (Kalimantan in the central and southern Indonesian part). The latter is divided into the state of Sarawak to the west and the state of Sabah to the west with the independent state of Brunei in between the two.
English in Malaysia forms a continuum from a basilect, often termed Manglish and heavily influenced by Malay (spoken by about 60% of the population), to an acrolectal form which is has had an exonormative orientation towards British English. However, since independence in 1957 the predominance of English in publich life and in education has waned. English is more favoured by the 26% Chinese section of the population and the 7% Indians in Malaysia.
Malaysian English tends to be non-rhotic and the interdental fricatives are generally realised as stops. A large range of pragmatics markers is to be found in spoken Malaysian English which derive from forms of Chinese.
The Malay language is spoken in the state of Malaysia and, in a slightly different form, in Indonesia by approximately 20 million native speakers and by 60 million speakers in all. It is found throughout the following countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, parts of Thailand. Malay is an Austronesian language belonging to the Western Austronesian branch.
Malay is agglutinative in type and has a basic SVO word order. Slightly different versions of the Roman alphabet are used for Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia. The influence of Dutch on Bahasa Indonesia is minimal but that of English on both forms is considerable.
Indonesia is the largest country in South-East Asia with a land area of nearly two million square kilometres and a population of about 237 million. Its colonial history is Dutch, being administered for a few centuries by the Dutch East India Company. It declared its independence from The Netherlands in 1945 and became the Republic of Indonesia. The official (standardised) language is Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia) is a form of Malay and Austronesian language which is largely mutually comprehensible with Bahasa Malay spoken in Malaysia.
English in East Asia
English in China – including Taiwan and Hong Kong – is non-native but is spreading rapidly due to the importance of English in international trade and as a lingua franca (this also applies to Japan). In this respect Chinese English is a New English, though the degree of competence of speakers varies greatly and is not anywhere near that found in other Anglophone locations of South-East Asia such as Hong Kong and the Phillipines. As is typical with New Englishes there is much phonetic interference from background languages. In the case of Chinese English, vowel length is not distinctive and consonant clusters are greatly simplified. In addition the intonation used is quite different from native forms of English, something which impairs comprehensibility.
For more information, please consult the separate module on English in China in the Varieties Tree.
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English in South Korea and Japan
South Korea
South Korea is a coutry covering the southern half of the Korean peninsula with an area of just over 100,000 square km and a population of approximately 49 million. Korean is the official language and the country is almost entirely ethnically Korean. English is a foreign language with competence in the language varying greatly on an individual level. In education considerable emphasis is placed on learning English which begins in elementary school and continues until the end of secondary school.
Japan
Japan is a country of some 128 million people living on a set of islands in the western Pacific covering an area of some 378,000 square km. Japan is almost 100% ethnically Japanese who speak the language Japanese almost exclusively. There is no official language but several regional languages such as Ainu (a language isolate on the northern island of Hokkaido) and the Ryukyuan languages (related to Japanese) on the Ryukyu Islands to the south-west of Japan are recognised.
As in Korea, English is a foreign language in Japanese which is spoken with varying degree of proficiency depending on education and exposure to English. Japanese has also a large number of phonologically adopted loans from English for which the general label gairaigo ‘loanword’ is used.