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By taking Malaysia as a case in point, this paper explores ideological constructions regarding the position of the English language that are created as a result of collisions between prioritizing nationalist and realizing globalization agendas. Through a discourse analysis of newspaper texts across two of Malaysia’s press, The Star and New Straits Times, the discussion will show how these newspaper items represent certain world-views on ‘measures’ of the standardization of the English language. It is argued that they illuminate some of the many issues that stage dialogues between local/global continuities and disjunctures on how English language ‘should’ be positioned within the changing and challenging landscape of multilingualism and ‘global English.’ This article also attempts to extend the debate further to show examples of postcolonial ‘revisions’ to displace these points, highlighting alternative voices to articulate colonial ‘visions’ of the globalization of English.

Orang Asli is a group of indigenous people who live according to a set of lifestyle and belief system and speak the native language. Previous studies have found that the Orang Asli are mostly depicted in the news media as backwards and dependent on others (Marlina Jamal & Shakila Abdul Manan, 2016). Such stereotypical depiction is shared with other research undertaken in various countries, particularly those in Canada or Australia. While many of these studies analysed findings from the media and communication or socio-cultural perspectives, the present study examines the representation of Orang Asli in Malaysian news/media by focusing on the use of language, i.e. linguistic viewpoint. The examination undertaken in this study focuses on headlines and lead paragraphs of one of the most influential English language newspapers in Malaysia. This study demonstrates the synergy of two methodological approaches in linguistics namely critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Our main findings show how Orang Asli is consistently depicted around stereotypical news narratives such as issues of land rights and other resources. We also found that the voices of Orang Asli leaders are overshadowed by other authorities such as the state government. Thus, this study contributes to shed light on the linguistics resources and language patterns used to portray the Orang Asli in Malaysian newspapers. Keywords: Orang Asli; news discourse; corpus linguistics; critical discourse analysis; indigenous people

This paper analyzes traces of masculinity by examining Malaysian sports news, centralizing the discussion on emotions in sports news discourse. Specifically, it compares the depictions of m...

This paper investigates the impact of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) on the way English language teaching (ELT) is currently understood and practised in Mal...