Taming Babel : language in the making of Malaysia
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Taming Babel : language in the making of Malaysia
Cambridge University Press, 2018
- : paperback
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
"First published 2016. First paperback edition 2018"--T.p. verso
Includes bibliographical references (p. 231-255) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Taming Babel sheds new light on the role of language in the making of modern postcolonial Asian nations. Focusing on one of the most linguistically diverse territories in the British Empire, Rachel Leow explores the profound anxieties generated by a century of struggles to govern the polyglot subjects of British Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia. The book ranges across a series of key moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which British and Asian actors wrought quiet battles in the realm of language: in textbooks and language classrooms; in dictionaries, grammars and orthographies; in propaganda and psychological warfare; and in the very planning of language itself. Every attempt to tame Chinese and Malay languages resulted in failures of translation, competence, and governance, exposing both the deep fragility of a monoglot state in polyglot milieux, and the essential untameable nature of languages in motion.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Part I. The Colonial State: 1. The technocrats: challenges of governance in a polyglot society
- 2. The knowledge producers: taming sounds, scripts and selves
- Part II. Word Wars: 3. The lexicographers: dictionaries and the making of postwar politics
- 4. The propagandists: public relations, psychological warfare and the making of the influential state
- Part III. The Postcolonial State: 5. The language planners: Dewan Bahasa in the invention and constriction of the postcolonial nation-state
- Postscript
- Appendices
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index.
by "Nielsen BookData"