HERE'S an advisory to Malaysians who have to speak to the world on a big megaphone, regardless if it's a post-match interview or at the United Nations General Assembly.
If your spoken English is broken, switch to your mother tongue. If your English has been affected by social media influencers, refrain from being pretentious by enunciating in the King's English.
It embarrasses your nation, your alma mater, your teachers and yourself. There's no shame in bantering in your native tongue: decent Bahasa Malaysia will do, though exasperatingly, many Malaysians, even the so-called highly educated, sputter in Manglish when speaking in the official language.
If your command of Bahasa Malaysia might invite ridicule, then communicate in your preferred vernacular. The interviewer just has to secure an interpreter.
We raise this issue because of the mirth around a 14-second viral video that showed national men's doubles shuttler Haikal Nazri, in a post-match interview after winning the Guwahati Masters title in Assam, India, with partner Choong Hon Jian, responding to an interviewer in broken English.
Haikal and Choong are not to be faulted here: while they won pride for Malaysia, their generation was deprived of a decent English education. But we have seen and heard worse: a Malaysian leader once faltered unintelligibly in topsy-turvy tenses at the topmost global arena and he grew up when the school syllabus was mainly in English.
English is a colonial legacy left by the British. The language has given Malaysians an upper hand to acquire knowledge, attend Western universities, get highly technical jobs and engage in global politics and business.
But this has been subverted these days: big jobs and businesses are no longer centred in English, but in Mandarin, due to China's economic clout, technological supremacy and military might.
Interestingly, hordes of Chinese citizens, despite understanding the global power that Mandarin has, insist on learning English through classes and tutorials. These Chinese must know something we don't.
A major reason why Malaysians' English is grinded out of a blender is the absence of active home acclimatisation. Notice that children adept in spoken and written English are usually nurtured by parents who use the language well.
They speak the language daily, watch loads of English television programmes and movies, read and write in English regularly and, for some, even think in English. In these homes, English is a joy to learn and express.
It's not about laughing at the inability to speak English well, but as a nation that once commanded the language well, we have degenerated in our standards. One day, this may stifle our ideas, even if they are of world-class brilliance.