Malaysian English Essay

2.1 The features of Malaysian English and their reasons and functions

According to a research paper conducted by Razali (1995), she aimed to describe the features of the tag questions in Malaysian English produced by thirty students at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), and contrasted them against the tag features of standard British English. His study revealed that most of his subjects rarely used the appropriate forms of tag questions as in SBrE, instead the four frequently used form of tags identified were 'right? ', 'is it? ', 'isn 't it? ', and 'aaa '. It is evident that the subjects tended to simplify the correct form. For instance, the subject used the tag ‘right’ which contrast to the verb phrase of the preceding clause 'have you’ in the sentence “You have heard about the

The most commonly used tag question in this study was “aaa’ where it served the function of a tag question as derived from its final position. In addition, the study realized that the only pronoun found in all of the tags collected is the pronoun 'it '. 'It ' is resoundingly used without any recognition given to the subject of the preceding clause. This aligns well with Wong 's (1983: 35) claim that the tag questions of colloquial Malaysian English are a 'vastly reduced system '. In short, the tag questions produced by the samples deviate greatly from the correct form of SBrE.

On the other hand, the common features of CMalE, according to Pillai (2012) can be categorized under seven main categories. The first one is in regard to the noun phrase, which she explained that Malaysians have the tendency to use plural form for uncountable nouns such as equipments and informations (Lowand Brown 2005, Wee 2008) and irregular nouns (e.g. deers and phenomenons). There is also a tendency to omit the articles in front of the noun phrase among