The Sri Lanka Malays: "dominated from the outside, dominated from the inside" - issues of power, privilege, and identity in the formulation of the 'endangerment' of the Sri Lanka Malay language and its language revitalisation initiatives

© 2014 Dr. Asmara Romola RassoolThe awareness that language ideologies are underpinned by issues of power and hegemony has dominated the work of many poststructuralist linguists. This awareness has also found its way into the language endangerment related discourse of the 21st century. In the Sri Lanka Malay context, there is an uncritiqued view among certain segments of the community that the Sri Lanka Malay language (SLM) is ‘endangered’ and that this ‘endangerment’ can be stemmed by advocating a move towards Standard Malay. The aim of this thesis is to critically analyse the notion that SLM is ‘endangered’. In particular, it examines the means by which the notion of ‘endangerment’ is constructed and productively employed by various agents to justify a range of language revitalisation efforts, each with its own political agenda. The critiquing of the view that SLM is ‘endangered’ is undertaken through two means: (a) by using an adapted version of a Language Vitality Test to provide an empirical assessment of the actual language vitality of the SLM language, and (b) by inquiring into the language ideologies of the SL Malay community as they are demonstrated in discourses surrounding identity and language maintenance. In this thesis I maintain that the advocacy of a movement towards a more ‘standard’ language on the part of the urban, educated, upper middle class Malays stems from a politics of disempowerment and a desire to perpetuate the hegemonic situation that already exists between that social class and the rural, lower class majority. In this regard, I ask if the larger SLM community is not doubly disadvantaged: on the one hand, by the SL Malays’ minority political status in Sri Lanka; and, on the other, by the attitudes of some members of its own upper-middle class urban community