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The linguistic landscape of a Malaysian border town

How English language is allowed to thrive outside of the law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2019

Thomas McKiernan
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Extract

This study focuses on the residential neighbourhoods of Johor Bahru city, the administrative and business centre of the Johor Bahru region and the Malaysian state of Johor. Johor Bahru is a border town, located in the very south of peninsular Malaysia, less than one mile away from Singapore. According to City Population (2018), the Johor Bahru region has a multi-ethnic population of almost 1.4 million, comprised of native ‘Bumiputera’ (52%), Chinese (37.4%), Indian (9.9%) and ‘other’ (0.6%) citizens. Hutchinson and Bhattacharya (2019: 1) describe economic links with Singapore as ‘long standing, far-reaching, spanning trade in goods and services, as well as foreign direct investment (FDI) and movement of people’; both countries are one another's ‘second most important trading partner, in both cases surpassed only by China and outranking traditional commercial allies such as the United States and Japan’.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 224 - 235
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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