Malaysia Dialect La!

Well, this time I gonna talk about the feature of Malaysia Language, perhaps you will find out a lot of grammar and structure mistakes in this post. But, no worry, keep going la! Majority of Malaysian has the slang which is pretty distinctive, it is so called Manglish. Mieke Bal and Norman (1991:174) says about the semiotic 'the study of sign', 'human culture is made up of signs. each of which stands for something other than itself, and the people inhabiting culture busy themselves making sense of those signs'. Therefore, the text and image in Malaysia's advertisement only can be encoded by Malaysian. I will show a few classical examples to show how 'busy' is Malaysian making sense with those SIGN. haha!

This P1's advertising campaign is selling Wireless Fidelity, giving up old style telephoneline. This campaign is using Malaysia's dialect, 'cut already or not?' The polysemy, a sign has more than one meaning. It is powerful to position its viewers in a specific imaginary social place. It produces a familiar preferred meaning and become preferred reading to Malaysian. Why do I say 'familiar? The another meaning of cut is cutting male's prepuce. As you see, either the print ad or tvc, the main character is MALE. It is hard to avoid that it makes people feel misunderstanding. If you know what I mean. >.< Since Malaysia's cultural background, people get familiar with this dialect, advertisement plays with the text in order to speak effectively to target audience.

                                             

                                           

 

Secondly, this is SUPER Ipoh coffee, same method it used as the P1, 我叫你试 (I want you to try!!!!) has permeated through the people. My dad kept saying that to me during that time, it is quite annoying but pretty funny. Haha! I couldn't find the original one, but this campaign shows how busy is Malaysian making sense with this sign. The language is impressive enough, not because of the fantastic text it uses, but the dialect and the slang that local people familiar with.

Last but not least, this Myvi advertising campaign I heard from radio last year, this is very impressive to me because of the terminology 'jikdak-logy'. At the first time, I was curious about the special noun until I see the TVC. 'Jikdak' is the Cantonese pronunciation, '值得' in Mandarin, means worth. I can say that I experienced  this signifying process to know what the sign actually stands for. Judith Williomson (1978:40) said, 'all signs depend for their signifying process in the existence of specifc, concrete receivers, people for whom and in whose systems of belief, they have meaning'. 

Conclusion, knowing the construction of society as knowing the culture of one place and the people is how advertising making meaning socially and effectively.