Bahasa Malaysia has been perversely anglicised from a few choice but necessary words to as many words, at will, that thrust the language's purest complexion into oblivion.
The anglicisation greatly depends on the original "angliciser": in its early days, it was a famed sasterawan, an influential author or poet.
Then a powerful politician, perhaps a prime minister or two, and now practically any social media influencer. The beef is not in its constitutional mandate as an official language, but in its communication.
Anglicisation initially permeated after Merdeka — from a steady stream to the gush it is now, indiscriminately vanishing outstanding Malay words.
It's paradoxically bizarre — no, make that embarrassing — that preserving Bahasa Malaysia's purity is waged today in the Leader of this English daily.
The earliest anglicisation could have been this 1971 book by Senu Abdul Rahman in imploring Malays to get out of their socio-economic funk. Entitled Revolusi Mental, it is an earth-shaker that also cracked the floodgates.
This was the definitive moment: a Malay daily giddily front-paged once this grandiose headline "Merealisasi Transformasi (Realising Transformation)" without a bald hint of irony. It did formalise the epoch that "English can be Malay".
Snatching a liberal hint, a certain cable content provider gaudily bragged itself as "sungguh awesome", thus assuming the poster boy mantle of anglicised Malay. From there on, the permissive filching of English words became de rigueur: get a hold of applikasi, sensasi, debri, dokumentasi, klise, monopoli, birokrasi, konsensus, bersolidariti, sentimen, negatif, sensitif, aktiviti... And these were all collated this week from mainstream Malay newspapers.
To be sure, useful Malay options could have been inserted, but the publishers probably thought their lingua franca as "uncool". It is galling to read belanjawan being miscued into bajet, just as it is galling to see enclave morphing into enklaf in Putrajaya, the city of the presint.
What compelled Bahasa Malaysia, with its own rich historical and traditional (tradisi by the way) words, to metamorphosise its provenance into something Frankensteinish?
British colonialism may have triggered this duality: the Malay-speaking crowd's free-for-all improvisation of their written and oral language with nifty sobriquets of kipidup, dongivup, frus and serius. But try suggesting that they formally learn English: a volcanic eruption of nationalistic, anti-Western pique will then ensue.
Granted, Bahasa Malaysia has evolved and some words can't muster decent equivalents — ekonomi, komputer, teknologi, indeks, telefon (talipon?) and mesin are some prime examples. But to consummate English in sound, appearance or character, as Wikipedia defined anglicisation, at the expense of excellent Malay colloquy is plain pretentious (or pretensi).
As we accept these linguistic substitutions, resistance intensifies to deny English as the technological, diplomatic and pop culture language the world over.
If we aren't careful, future generations will oddly learn English with this grody technique: learning Malay to master English! And we haven't even touched on the Arabic replicants.