Redefine The Notion Of Mother Tongue

In multilingual settings,researchers find communities that in certain sociohistorical environments undergo significant changes in their mother tongue,which are often due to language contact,code-switching and codemixing.An attempt is made to reveal the real mother tongue of the young Malaysian Chinese in Kuala Lumpur.The data presented in this paper was collected with the combination of three methodologies: breaching experiments,reflective diaries and focus group interviews.This paper argues that the “Rojak Chinese”(mixed Chinese),a linguistic variety which results from code-mixing,is the real mother tongue of young Malaysian Chinese and the default code choice among their daily speeches.This study provides empirical evidence of codemixing being the result of the following linguistic motivations: the “unmarked” choice of the linguistic community,a lexical gap and unconformity in semantics,identity alignment and a sense of national identity,the firsthand concept being received in non-Chinese,and economic principles.This paper also argues that the overall code-mixed variant produced by the speakers in multilingual settings,such as Rojak Chinese by Malaysian Chinese,should not be seen as a product of blending between two or more languages.In other words,the speakers who code-mixed in their speeches are unnecessarily bi-/multilinguals.Last but not least,the testers showed a positive attitude towards their code-mixed mother tongue and asserted that the act to “purify” the mother tongue is considered needless in the multilingual settings of Malaysia.