Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemVernacularising the law: Malaysia's bilingual policy as a model for postcolonial common law systems.( 2014)Malaysia is among a dozen or so common law-based jurisdictions that use a language other than English in the legal domain. Common law, which is much the largest legal system but cohabits with Syariah and customary law, functions in two languages: Malay, the national language and official legal medium, and English, the colonial medium still admissible in court in ‘the interests of justice’. This study investigated why and how bilingual law has been implemented in Malaysia using a language planning perspective, whereby linguistic reform is seen as motivated more by extralinguistic factors such as politics and socioeconomics than by linguistic factors such as communicative need. The perspective considers manipulation of language status, corpus, acquisition and discourse to be key components of planning. Evidence for these interrelated processes was found through documentary analysis of laws, judgments, and educational and news reports, as well as in interviews with lawyers, law lecturers, law students and administrators. The study also explored how lawyers and future lawyers orientate to bilingual practices. Interviews were conducted with 55 lawyers, 18 lecturers teaching law or language for law, and 9 administrators involved with legal affairs. These were supplemented with questionnaire data from nearly 500 law students and with follow-up interviews with some 100 of them. Drawing on structuration theory’s emphasis on the recursive relationship between individual behaviour and inherited rules and resources, agency was found to be highly constrained by the politicised character of language planning and authoritarian nature of legal institutions, yet immanent in tensions in the language policy itself between idealism and pragmatism, sociopolitical stability and economic growth, national unity and international engagement. Agency is also contingent on the bilingual proficiency of practitioners. The third strand of the study compared Malaysia’s experience with other common law jurisdictions that have attempted vernacularisation. Use of languages other than English is confined to a minority of jurisdictions and very few of these employ them extensively in higher courts or jurisprudence. This makes Malaysian bilingual law unusual, interesting, and a potential model for other multilingual postcolonial societies seeking to enhance access to justice while maintaining legal stability and integrity. Comprehensive bilingual legal resources and systematic bilingual training are argued to be critical for effective vernacularisation.