Cultural literacy in Chinese and Malay

Abstract

The discussion suggests that there are many meaningful ways of making important messages beyond lexical meaning. Speakers of Malay and Chinese have been applying meaningful linguistic systems consistently by accentuating meaning at subword levels to communicate, preach, scorn, and interact with members in their respective speech communities. Such cultural-specific verbal styling in speech, however, is not accounted for in language standardization. The word is commonly accepted as the basic meaning unit conducive to language planning and lexicography. Nonetheless, effort to understand meaningful linguistic units below the level of a word stem is relevant to both cultural literacy and group cohesion. The failure to understand and participate in the production of meaning in subword level sounds is a form of cultural autism. This results in a loss of interactive essence which is conventionally signaled subtly in native speech style. By highlighting versatile meaning-making in the selected language data, the discussion complements the focus on current lexical expansion in standard written literacy.

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