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Social Meaning, Indexicality and Enregisterment of Manglish in Youth Whatsapp Chats

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Social Meaning, Indexicality and Enregisterment of Manglish in Youth Whatsapp Chats SOCIAL MEANING, INDEXICALITY AND ENREGISTERMENT OF MANGLISH IN YOUTH WHATSAPP CHATS Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy NUR HUSNA SERIP MOHAMAD Department of English School of the Arts September 2019 1 ABSTRACT Manglish, a variety of Malaysian English, has often been stereotyped in Malaysian media (i.e., local newspapers) as ‘improper English’ (Why Speak Manglish, 2007; Manglish-English Dilemma, 2007) or labelled by scholars as a type of ‘poor’, ‘broken’ English (Nair-Venugopal, 2013: 455). In fact, speakers of Manglish have been associated with ‘rural background’, ‘low-status’ in society, as well as ‘uneducated’ (Mahir, and Jarjis, 2007: 7). In recent years, there have been increasing debates on the status and use of Manglish, where it is a preferred variety of linguistic expression and is widely employed within certain contexts. The rise of Manglish has been hardly ignored in various social media platforms. This raises questions on how and why Manglish is employed or chosen as a language to communicate within online settings such as Instant Messaging. Thus, the (social) meanings that underlie Manglish communicative practices deserve exploration. This thesis seeks to contribute to the current discussion in linguistic studies on Manglish among three ethnic groups in Malaysia which are Malay, Chinese and Indian, by exploring how in-groupness and ethnic identity is reflected in the way speaker use Manglish features in WhatsApp conversation. More specifically, it focuses on the use of Manglish through the perspective of indexicality (Silverstein, 2003), social meaning (Eckert, 2003) and enregisterment (Agha, 2003). This present study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection namely WhatsApp chat, online ethnography, online interview and online questionnaire to aid in the interpretation and analysis process. The quantitative analysis derived from the WhatsApp chats demonstrate the differences in the distribution of Manglish features across ethnic groups. Further statistical analysis shows that there is a significant correlation between specific Manglish features such as lor, leh and de with ethnicity. This correlation is further explored through qualitative analysis, where data was collected through online ethnographies and interviews. It shows that speakers tend to utilise Manglish in various ways to denote ethnicity, in- 2 groupness, stances or regional identity. These meanings are dynamic as they shift according to speaker and addressee as well as the context of conversation. Moreover, some Manglish features (e.g lor, leh, de and lah) identified in the dataset may have double indexicalities, namely second and third-order which eventually results in the enregisterment of these features. For example, data analysed from the online questionnaire shows that Chinese speakers in this thesis associate specific features such as lor and lah with Chineseness, as well Malaysianness; this implies second and third-order of indexicality which relates to the process of enregisterment. It follows that this thesis contributes to the notion of enregisterment as it shows that linguistic features are not only enregistered to region or place as observed by existing studies so far, but also ethnicity. 3 Acknowledgement There are far too many people that has given me courage and support along this journey. I would first like to acknowledge both my supervisors, Dr Sofia Lampropoulou and Dr Paul Cooper for their full guidance, support and importantly, patience and tolerance in helping me throughout the stages of completing the thesis. Their full commitment in supervisory and giving valuable comments right till the end is deeply appreciated. I would not be able to finish this thesis without both of you. I also thank MARA for sponsoring my doctorate studies for the years 2015-2018. I also thank the participants who provided valuable data for this study. I also received support from my fellow research student in the University of Liverpool, and especially Alex who has been helping with the English translation of the data. To Hattan, thank you for contributing ideas concerning the statistical work in this thesis. I have also received massive opportunities from the School of the Arts in providing incentives to attend conferences around the globe. My family has also been my backbone throughout my journey as a student. I am most grateful to my mother, Hajerah, and also my late father, Serip Mohamad, for always believing me. I am also grateful to be surrounded with positive minded siblings, as well as my housemates in Liverpool. To my husband, Awall Fiqri, thank you for being the most understanding and encouraging person throughout this journey. Last, but not least, thank you for all who have made it possible. 4 Contents Abstract 1 Acknowledgement 3 List of Tables 7 List of Figures 9 Abbreviation 11 Chapter 1: Introduction 12 1.1 Introduction 12 1.2 Study Rationale 13 1.3 Research Aims and Questions 14 1.4 Organization of the thesis 18 Chapter 2: Malaysian English: Sociohistorical Background 23 and Status in Malaysia 2.1 Introduction 23 2.2 Malaysian English as Part of World 24 Englishes 2.3 The Malaysian Geographical 30 Background 2.3.1 Linguo-historic context of Malaysia 32 2.4 Use of English Language in Malaysia 36 2.4.1 The Status of English in 36 Malaysia 2.4.2 Language Shift, Attitudes, and 39 Perceptions towards English and Ethnic Languages in Malaysia 2.4.3 Sociolectal Features of the Varieties of 41 ME 2.5 Manglish: Criteria and Examples 46 2.6 Manglish in Online Settings 54 2.7 Conclusion 59 Chapter 3: Style, Indexicality and Enregisterment 60 3.1 Introduction 60 3.2 Third-Wave Variation Studies: Attention to 61 Style and Social Meaning 3.3 Indexicalities and Enregisterment 69 3.3.1 Acts of Identity 74 3.4 Interactional Sociolinguistics 77 3.4.1 Swearing 78 3.4.2 Style-shifting and Contextualization 83 5 Cues 3.5 Conclusion 88 Chapter 4: Methodology 89 4.1 Introduction 89 4.2 Data Site: WhatsApp Messenger 90 4.3 Data Collection and Overall Dataset 93 4.4 Ethical Considerations 98 4.4.1 Researcher’s Position and 100 Relationship with Participants 4.5 Data Types and Methods 102 4.5.1 WhatsApp Chats 102 4.5.2 Online Ethnography 105 4.5.3 Online Interview 107 4.5.4 Online Questionnaire 108 4.6 Data Triangulation 112 4.7 Translation and Transliteration 114 Studies 4.8 Data Analysis Methods 117 4.8.1 Quantitative Analysis 118 4.8.2 Statistical Package for the Social 120 Sciences (SPSS) 4.9 Conclusion 121 Chapter 5: Frequencies, Distributions and the Construction of Ethnic Identity 122 5.1 Introduction 122 5.2 Common Manglish Features in the 123 WhatsApp Data 5.3 Intimacy and Ethnic Identity among 129 Manglish Speakers 5.4 Discussion 149 5.5 Conclusion 154 Chapter 6: Lah and Swear words in Ingroup Conversation 156 6.1 Introduction 156 6.2 Lah in my dataset 157 6.2.1 The use of lah in Hoon’s WhatsApp 158 conversation 6.3 Swearing and Lah 163 6.4 Discussion 187 6.5 Conclusion 195 Chapter 7: Indexicality and Enregisterment of Manglish 197 7.1 Introduction 197 6 7.2 ‘Provide Manglish features’ Results for all 198 Speakers 7.3 Overlap between ‘Provide Manglish 200 Features’ across the Three ethnic groups 7.4 Multiple-Choice Results for All Ethnic 203 Groups 7.4.1 Level 1 208 7.4.2 Level 2 211 7.4.3 Level 3 214 7.5 Overlapping Features between three Ethnic 217 groups in Multiple-Choice Results 7.5.1 Village people: Characterological 220 Figure of a Typical Malaysian 7.5.2 Enregisterment of Ethnic-specific 228 Features 7.5.3 Enregisterment of New Manglish 230 Features 7.6 Social Values Indexed by Manglish 231 7.7 Conclusion 237 Chapter 8: Summary and Conclusion 238 8.1 Introduction 238 8.2 Chapters Overview 239 8.3 Significance of the Study 244 8.4 Limitations of the Study 245 8.5 Direction for Future Research 246 8.6 Conclusion 248 References 249 Appendix 1 Sample of Consent Letter 282 Appendix 2 Participant Information form 284 Appendix 3 Sample Questions for Semi-structured 287 interview Appendix 4 Online Questionnaire Sample 288 Appendix 5 Sample of WhatsApp emoticon 292 Appendix 6 SPSS result 296 Appendix 7 Distribution of lor, leh and de among 302 Chinese speakers and addressees Appendix 8 Distribution of Lah across the whole dataset 317 7 List of Tables Table Title Page 2.1 Malaysian population by ethnic group 30 2.2 Three main varieties of ME, according to the extant 43 literature 2.3 Tail words recorded in the extant literature 47 2.4 Functions of Malaysian English Discourse Particles 47 3.1 The documentation of a variety of sociolinguistic 81 variables in analysing swearing 4.1 Data size in CMC studies 94 4.2 Demographic information of participants 95 4.3 Manglish features listed in the multiple-choice 109 questionnaire 4.4 Criteria for multiple-choice questionnaire 112 5.1 Frequencies and Distribution of Common Manglish 124 Features across Three Ethnic Groups in the WhatsApp Dataset 5.2 Mean ranks and sum of ranks for lor, leh and de, 128 produced by Chinese-Chinese Conversations and Chinese-others Conversations 5.3 Mann-Whitney U- test results for lor, leh and de per 128 1000 words in Chinese conversations 5.4 Distribution of lor, leh and de per 1,000 words in 130 Laura’s Conversations 6.1 Distribution of lah alongside swearwords per 1000 164 words 7.1 Listed Manglish features in online questionnaire 198 7.2 Overlaps in the ‘Provide Manglish Feature’ among 201 the three ethnic groups 8 7.3 Overlap between Manglish features in Multiple-
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