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Malaysia is a multiethnic nation with an estimated population of 30.8 million population (Department of Statistics Malaysa, 2025a). While more than half (58.3%) of the population comprises Malays, 22.2% are Chinese. Chinese Malaysians are generally categorised according to dialect groups, e.g., Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka. However, in present day Malaysia, Mandarin is increasingly replacing these dialects (Pillai & Zainuddin, 2025; Vollmann & Soon, 2018; Xiaomei, 2016). The Hokkien community is the biggest Chinese dialect group in Malaysia. However, there are varieties of Hokkien depending on which part of Malaysia it is spoken. One of these varieties is the Hokkien spoken in Kelantan, which borders southern Thailand. Kelantan is a Malay-Muslim majority state comprising 95.5% Malays. The Chinese make up 2.4% of the estimated 1.9 million population (Department of Statistics Malaysa, 2025b) of whom the majority are Hokkien (Tan, 1997). The Kelantan variety of Hokkien (KH) is a localized variety of Hokkien that is influenced by the Kelantan Malay dialect (KM) and the local variety of Thai referred to as Siamese. Contact with the local Malay community in this state has resulted in most Hokkien people being fluent in KM (Pue, Ong, & Loo, 2019). The younger generation also tend to be more fluent in Mandarin (Pillai & Zainuddin, 2025; Xiaomei, 2016). It is posited that changing national language and education policies and socio-economic priorities, and language contact over the years would have influenced multilingual practices among the KH community. Yet these influences remain understudied. Thus, we were motivated to examine the following:
(1) The patterns of use that emerge in each generation of the KH Chinese.
(2) The extent to which the preservation of KH is related to the respondents sense of identity as Malaysian, KH and Chinese?
In this chapter, we discuss the findings in relation to intergenerational differences in patterns of language use and the attachment to KH as a heritage language across the three generations.
References
Department of Statistics Malaysia (2025b). Current population estimates, Malaysia, 2025. Retrieved from https://storage.dosm.gov.my/demography/population_2025.pdf
Department of Statistics Malaysia (2025a). Demographic statistics Malaysia, second quarter 2025. Retrieved from https://www.dosm.gov.my
Pillai, S., & Zainuddin, S. Z. (2025). Top-down policies and the language profiles of Malaysians in a multilingual language ecology. In P.Siemund, G. Stein & M. Vida-Mannl (Eds.), World Englishes in their local multilingual ecologies (pp. 116-142). John Benjamins.
Pue, G. H., Ong, P. L., & Loo, H. C. (2019). Kelantan Peranakan Chinese language and marker of group identity. Gema Online Journal of Language Studies, 19(2), 33-51. http://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2019-1902-03
Tan, C.-B. (1997). Chinese identities in Malaysia. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 25(2), 103-116. https://doi.org/10.1163/030382497X00194
Vollmann, R., & Soon, T. W. (2018). Chinese identities in multilingual Malaysia. Grazer Linguistische Studien, 89, 35-61. https://doi.org/10.25364/04.45:2018.89.3
Xiaomei, W. (2016) The Chinese language in the Asian diaspora: A Malaysian experience. In G. Leitner, A. Hashim, H.-G. Wolf (Eds). Communicating with Asia: The future of English as a global language (pp. 205-215). Cambridge University Press.