Difference Address Term Between Anglo and Malay

1. Introduction

Everyone has their own means on how they view the world, and from the way they view the world from people’s behaviour to beliefs; that is how culture is defined. As culture is dynamic based on Jackson (2014), giving English language as an example, there are differences in pronunciation and spelling due to local culture in that country. It shows that culture may able to influence the language usage of the country. Malaysia is a multiracial country thus the usage of multilingual in daily conversation is common, where they always practice code-switching as most Malaysians are bilingual (Tan, 2013). In Southeast Asia, kinship terms are used by anyone that needs to cooperate or have relationship (Adams, Kathleen, & Kathleen, 2011). It is common in Southeast Asia country to address strangers using kinship term to show respect and ethnic belonging (Kirkpatrick, 2002). As for Australian English, it almost similar with American English or British English however, due to its culture where it is more direct compared to the other two, it can be quite offensive towards interlocutors that used to formality (Collins, 2012). That same goes to address term. According to Wood & Kroger (as cited in Xizhen, 2008) study of address terms have been popular topic in sociolinguistics because address term open communicative act and establish relative power and distance of interlocutors. Usage of address terms can be varying between countries as each has different cultural practices. The purpose of this study is to compare the usage of address term by Malay-Malaysian (MM) and Anglo-Australian (AA) in their daily life towards individual with low or high social distance from the speaker.

1. Method of Data collection

This study is based on known and unknown individuals by researcher in Melbourne. Since the study based on a mixture of known and unknown individuals by the researcher, researcher used ethnography method where researcher observes the interlocutors while they were having interactions and the conversations were manually written in the notes. The conversations that recorded were tabulated as can be seen in Table 1. This allows researcher represented it quantitatively .The conversations that were recorded mainly focused on the way interlocutors address each other. The conversation data by the interlocutors were taken by researcher at various places such as in the University, at the park, at the market, through a video call and at an individual’s house. The interlocutors that were taken into this study were either AA or MM.  Several factors were taken into while researcher observed the interlocutors that involved in this study such as age, nature of the relationship, social distance and gender. The data that were recorded by researcher have 7 address terms by AA in 6 conversations and 8 address terms by MM in 5 conversations, which totalled up to 15 address terms.

1. Data analysis and presentation

Table 1: Showing the overall data recorded of interlocutors by ethnicity, age, nature of relationship, social distance.

*Notes: The bold letter in age column is the addressee and the normal letter in age is the speaker.