Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia by Rachel Leow

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.

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EAN: 9781316602607

UPC: 9781316602607

ISBN: 9781316602607

MPN: N/A

Book Title: Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia b

Item Length: 22.9 cm

Number of Pages: 281 Pages

Language: English

Publication Name: Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Publication Year: 2018

Subject: History

Item Height: 229 mm

Item Weight: 430 g

Type: Textbook

Author: Rachel Leow

Item Width: 152 mm

Format: Paperback