Because life is like that

More mosques in Singapore will use English for Friday sermon so as to accommodate the young who are more comfortable in the language so said MUIS the local Islamic authority. And yesterday at the Ashakirin Mosque where I did my Friday prayer, sermon was in English for a congregation of locals and some Bangladeshi workers.

Are we saying that the young in the Malay community are more comfortable in English and prefer not to speak in their mother tongue? If that is true, then I feel sad for them and the community as a whole.

During my school days, Malay language was a given subject. We don’t have to really spend time learning it but yet we could easily score above 90%. Today, kids are considered good if they can score 75% for the Malay language. Many just managed to scrimp thru. What’s happening? Perhaps, the “communal leaving”…….perhaps, the emphasis of English as business language…….perhaps this….perhaps that…….perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Parents prefer to speak English to the kids and the Malay language is only use when they communicate with the grandparents. The number of Malay speaking family is getting lesser and when these grandparents are gone……. there goes the language as well.

Will the Malays in Singapore be like the Malays in Cape Town or Sri Lanka where the Malay language is foreign to them? Frankly speaking, I don’t know.

The language which was once the National Language and the lingua franca of the archipelago may be history soonest. Who’s to be blamed?

“Tepuk dada tanya selera”. Welcome to Singapore.