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" Social Meaning, Indexicality and Enregisterment of Manglish in Youth WhatsApp Chats "
Serip Mohamad, Nur Husna
Lampropoulou, Sofia
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1107529
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TLpq2447591512
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| Main Entry
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Lampropoulou, Sofia
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Serip Mohamad, Nur Husna
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| Title & Author
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Social Meaning, Indexicality and Enregisterment of Manglish in Youth WhatsApp Chats\ Serip Mohamad, Nur HusnaLampropoulou, Sofia
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| College
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The University of Liverpool (United Kingdom)
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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321
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| Abstract
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Manglish, a variety of Malaysian English, has often been stereotyped in Malaysian media (i.e., local newspapers) as ‘improper English’ (Why Speak Manglish, 2007; Manglish-English Dilemma, 2007) or labelled by scholars as a type of ‘poor’, ‘broken’ English (Nair-Venugopal, 2013: 455). In fact, speakers of Manglish have been associated with ‘rural background’, ‘low-status’ in society, as well as ‘uneducated’ (Mahir, and Jarjis, 2007: 7). In recent years, there have been increasing debates on the status and use of Manglish, where it is a preferred variety of linguistic expression and is widely employed within certain contexts. The rise of Manglish has been hardly ignored in various social media platforms. This raises questions on how and why Manglish is employed or chosen as a language to communicate within online settings such as Instant Messaging. Thus, the (social) meanings that underlie Manglish communicative practices deserve exploration. This thesis seeks to contribute to the current discussion in linguistic studies on Manglish among three ethnic groups in Malaysia which are Malay, Chinese and Indian, by exploring how in-groupness and ethnic identity is reflected in the way speaker use Manglish features in WhatsApp conversation. More specifically, it focuses on the use of Manglish through the perspective of indexicality (Silverstein, 2003), social meaning (Eckert, 2003) and enregisterment (Agha, 2003). This present study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection namely WhatsApp chat, online ethnography, online interview and online questionnaire to aid in the interpretation and analysis process. The quantitative analysis derived from the WhatsApp chats demonstrate the differences in the distribution of Manglish features across ethnic groups. Further statistical analysis shows that there is a significant correlation between specific Manglish features such as lor, leh and de with ethnicity. This correlation is further explored through qualitative analysis, where data was collected through online ethnographies and interviews. It shows that speakers tend to utilise Manglish in various ways to denote ethnicity, in-groupness, stances or regional identity. These meanings are dynamic as they shift according to speaker and addressee as well as the context of conversation. Moreover, some Manglish features (e.g lor, leh, de and lah) identified in the dataset may have double indexicalities, namely second and third-order which eventually results in the enregisterment of these features. For example, data analysed from the online questionnaire shows that Chinese speakers in this thesis associate specific features such as lor and lah with Chineseness, as well Malaysianness; this implies second and third-order of indexicality which relates to the process of enregisterment. It follows that this thesis contributes to the notion of enregisterment as it shows that linguistic features are not only enregistered to region or place as observed by existing studies so far, but also ethnicity.
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Linguistics
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