Aiyo!

 Newcastle and Malaysia - A Shared Language? One for the Linguists

Aiyo! (sometimes also known as 'aiyoo' or 'oyo') and Lah! These are two features of the local dialect that I think should travel more widely and I'm here to see if I can get them to wash up on the shores of the UK.

It should also be said that I'm teaching my form class Geordie slang and I get them to answer the register with a whey aye, canny or alreet, so it only seems fair that I reciprocate and try to send a little bit of Malaysian slang back home too.

Now I know that both of these expressions exist beyond the shores of Penang and the use of 'lah' in particular is a signature of the Singaporean dialect too. 

Both of these 'lexemes' (posh word for, well... 'word') are not really words in the strictest sense. Their semantic (literal or dictionary definition) meaning is superseded by their pragmatic use, if indeed there is any strictly semantic meaning to be attached to either of these commonly used slang terms.

Let's start with the ubiquitous 'aiyo'. 

This is a noise more than a word and it expresses just what it sounds like it should express; surprise, annoyance, frustration. It is an expressive term which functions as an all purpose exclamation. 

I have heard it used by children, teenagers and adults in a range of situations, both to express genuine frustration and mock annoyance. It is a massively useful phrase as it requires little or no translation - it is acoustically clear what the 'word' means and it gives a real flavour of how expressive the Hokkien dialect in particular is. It is worth noting that the actual origins of the word seem to come from South African Indian dialects, where immigrant workers took dialects from their home country and flavoured their speech with African influences. There the word is more commonly represented as 'oyo', but functions in much the same way. From there it appears the word travelled back across the Indian Ocean and through the Andaman Sea and hit the shores of Malaysia!

'Lah' is probably the most iconic 'Malaysian' flavoured word, at least in parts of Malaysia where there is a significant Chinese population. It is definitely representative of Singaporean dialect and is heard frequently here in Penang. 

The closest cognate, and it is quite a good one, is either the use of 'like' or 'man' in the Geordie dialect. Both of these are what are know as 'pragmatic particles' - these are sentence elements that have an array of functions. They can replace entire grammatical units at the drop of a proverbial hat and are expressive beyond their immediate semantic connotations. 

Take the use of 'man' in a sentence I heard uttered long ago on a North Eastern street from a frustrated male to a presumably equally frustrated female counterpart.

"How man! Woman man! Man!"

This does not translate easily, but here we go...

In no case does the word 'man' in this example function as a gender specific noun, in the first case it actually works as a pronoun - 'How man' is a non-gendered exclamation directed at a second person (a woman in this case) and could even be described as a deictic determiner - a word with a specific sense of 'pointing' that is highly context dependent. Essentially the speaker is addressing the second person directly.

The second use of man, the confusing one immediately following 'woman', is clearly not a gender specific noun either. It again functions as an exclamation - one common in the North East and actually crops up frequently across the English speaking world - 'Aw, man!' could be heard frequently in the USA as an expression of disappointment or even sympathy depending on context.

The final 'man' is a true exclamatory - a sort of dramatic full stop that expresses frustration and annoyance.

Lah, is a actually much more gentle than this - a more direct cognate is the Geordie use of 'like'. 

It does often seem that Geordies are in search of an elusive simile. You may here a North Easterner saying something along the lines of  "I went out last night like..." This could leave the listener wondering what comparison his Northern interlocutor is about to make about his nighttime excursion. However the use of the word 'like' in this instance is simply an example of the pragmatic particle in action. Like, in this instance, is simply a sort of verbal full stop. The remainder of the conversation could go something like (sorry...);

"Where did you go like?"

"Whey, doon Tynemouth front street. It was canny busy like."

At no point did the work 'like' in these sentences perform the lexical functions of the preposition of comparison or the conjunction substituting for 'as if/though' - the two functions the word most commonly performs. Again it is the appearance of the pragmatic particle.

A pragmatic particle is a unit of language that is difficult to classify. They fulfil multiple functions depending on context of use, tone, emphasis etc. The Malaysian 'lah' is definitely a good example of this and the Geordie 'like' is a fairly good cognate for this typically Malaysian linguistic element. (I know as I checked a couple of sentences with the kids I teach and they confirmed that the use was near enough identical).

A common phrase is 'can, lah' used as an a affirmative response to a question e.g.

"Can you fit me in for an appointment?"

"Can, lah. You come back in 30 minutes?"

The lah doesn't actually change the meaning, it acts as a mild intensifier. It could equally follow a negative response such as 'cannot, lah' which would express regret in this instance. 

It is a very versatile word indeed, but it is looked down on by many speakers as a lazy mode of expression. 

This is typical of many attitudes towards spoken language across the world. Prescriptivists hate slang. They mistakenly assume it is an assault on the standard form, which it is clearly not. Yes, used in a formal context 'lah' is a as out of place as the Geordie 'like' or 'man' would be in a Oxbridge interview (whether this should be the case or not is debatable, but what is clear is that it is the case whether we like it or not). However its use is not a signal of laziness or poor education any more than a regional dialect anywhere else in the world is a signal of this.

Personally I like these two linguistic components of the spoken language of Malaysia. I think it adds character and clearly shows how languages can be transferred and adapted. The use of both terms in the English spoken here in Penang give it a distinctiveness that is similar to the dialects of the UK and it is interesting once again to see something that is at once so unique to the region, but startlingly similar to examples from home.

Until next time, lah!

Best wishes to you all.

(PS if you can think of any other examples of these pragmatic particles in any other dialect, please stick them in the comments section!)