Lexical Borrowing in Malaysian Writer’s Short Stories

Abstract

Malaysian English has its unique linguistic features in several aspects, from daily communication to fiction writing. Nowadays there are lots of Malaysian native writer who write novels and short stories in English. The reasons are:firstly, English has stayed and prosperous in Malaysia ever since the 19^th century when British arrived in Malaysia, today it is used and can be found everywhere in Malaysia, it is also taught as a second language in schools.Kachru(1985) defined it as an outer circle English variety together with countries and region like India, Hong kong where both of them had been colonised by the British in the history like Malaysia. Secondly, those Malaysian writers who write in English wish to obtain more international fame and readers since Malaysia itself has limited number of readers.In this paper, I focused on the lexical borrowing in a Malaysian writer Lee Kok Liang’s 18 short stories. There are a lot of Malaysian English features in

his short stories, but I only choose lexical borrowing since it is the most distinct one.