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Language plays a vital role in every communication of human life where people are able to speak and understand each other. However, despite having language, some people have misused the privilege of language to shame others for their incompetence. This denotes the idea of ‘language shaming’ where people used to mock the accent, pronunciation of the words, grammars and everything that may unconsciously affect the speaker. In fact, this social issue has been enormously grown in many generations either in public or media. Even though many people believe that language shaming serves more negative impacts than positive, but a wide range of language shaming issues still flooded the media and became the talks of people around the world. Having said that, some people may argue that language also serves benefit in which can improve one language to a better level. However, the impact of public shaming can be varied according to certain cases. It can be accepted for some people that language shaming help to motivate them, but this only will happen if it is done in a good manner but not for those who are poorly humiliated. In this case, people may become incurably flawed as a result of the humiliation.
On the other hand, language shaming defined as an attempt to downgrade one for interacting in a language that is not in their native language ( Lee, 2018). For one reason, this issue has been prevalent and lead to many cases. The history of Malaysia being as one of the British colonized countries had made English language be a mandatory language learned by students at all schools. Hence, this language is no longer new to Malaysian people which triggered the issue of people being condemned for shuttering or using broken English. For instance, Faiz Subri, a national footballer, was condemned for his broken English by a local journalist and mostly Malaysian citizens during his speech on the 2016 FIFA Award (Tan, 2017). Not only that, but fluent English speaker also has been mistakenly despised for not being able to uplift the level of a national language. Rais Yatim, former Minister of Information, Communication and Culture mocked a journalist from the online newspaper ‘The Star’ for asking questions in English. On the whole, these issues are a ridiculously accurate portrayal of how English and Malay language speakers are often shamed in Malaysia. Be it Malay or English, language is only a way of interaction and obviously not to reflect their professionalism or patriotism to the country.
As noted above, although Malay and English are only a way of communication, one should not emphasize on this idea to stop learning certain languages. Language is a tool of communication and needs to be mastered by everyone. Hence, it is normal for people to make some mistakes either in spoken or written form since it is only a part of the learning process. In short, language shaming should not be normalised in Malaysia as it may result in low self-esteem, social alienation and poor language proficiency.
Low self-esteem
Firstly, language shaming should not be normalized in Malaysia because it can lead to low self-esteem. According to Bottazi, Caretti, Garafalo and Velotti (2017), low self-esteem can be a result of language shaming which can constantly relate to hostility and psychological distress. In this case, most people probably feel inferior and helpless to start learning the language again. With that being said, instead of improving, the outcome may descend to greater harm. This can be supported with the statement from Winstead and Wang (2017) saying that the children at an early age are already experiencing language shaming in school which eventually initiated fear in them to speak in front of the public. Sooner or later, this also will diminish their level of confidence.
Aside from that, the negative judgement given by the people makes them feel inferior and scared of being called ‘not so intelligent’ (Vijaindren, 2017). This can be supported by a study from China done by Li Jia (as cited in Piller, 2017), highlighting an example of language shaming from a teacher. In this case, the study emphasizes how the teacher keeps on condemning the language used by an eleven-year-old boy instead of complementing the content of his answers. To make matters worse, she even downgrades him by linking the spelling mistakes to his age (Piller, 2017). This type of language shaming is ridiculously insulting the self-worth of the boy, especially when it comes from a teacher, who should be the one to motivate him to be better. This connotes the idea that teachers should intuitively understand the significance of supporting their students’ self-esteem as most learners do not take the same route or travel at the same speed.
In addition, language shaming not only diverts on incompetencies but also overperforming which indirectly lead to low self-esteem. For instance, fluent English speakers also can be victims of language shaming even for their high proficiency in English. As a result, most of them may feel the need to distance themselves from socializing with other people. This is a big loss for them because they cannot practise other languages without complaint from people around them. So, their confidence will decline from the nasty treatment given as well as ongoing language shaming cast upon them. But, their hardship is less severe than the one who cannot speak good English. For the case of Malaysian with poor English, people are looking down at them with the intention of relating the ability to communicate in English with intelligence level. This is supported with one case happened in Vietnam that was highlighted by Nguyen (2019, p. 44) saying “users make assumptions about Miss Vietnam’s education and intelligence level based solely on her two-minute long English speech”. Most of the assumptions are criticizing her for not able to portray her English perfectly. It is also influenced by the fact that she is a beauty queen and the face of Vietnam. In Malaysia, this similar scenario also happened because of the typical mindset that mastering English is the benchmark to be called a brilliant person. So, this condition will shake the confidence level of people who are still struggling to improve their English. If language shaming did not stop, it will slowly reduce their self-esteem to interact and communicate with other people.
Thus, it is clear that language shaming causes the downfall of an individual’s self-esteem. In the beginning, the impact of language shaming is less severe because it will be more on advice although given in a harsh way rather than humiliating. But if it is not put to an end, the result might impact more disaster especially timid appearance in the public. Therefore, it is undeniable that great treatment of language shaming will bring forth people with low self-esteem.
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