“To lose a language is to lose a world.”
– Kenneth Hale, linguist
WARM Greetings and Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri to my dear readers.
It is already the second Saturday of April – the 18th day of Syawal – and here is your weekend Digital Zen. As the festive visiting winds down and the rhythm of daily life returns, I find myself lingering on the sounds of our celebrations. In the living rooms of Sarawak, we navigate a beautiful, chaotic linguistic landscape. We drift between English, Malay, and our mother tongues with a fluidity that defines our identity as a people of the confluence.
Yet, have you ever stopped to count the “micro-losses” in your daily speech? We pause mid-sentence, searching for a word that fits the soul of our thought, only to find a vacuum where our heritage used to be. We ask, “Macam ney madah tok dalam ya tek?” or “How do you say ‘explore’ in my own language again?” Usually, we take the modern path of least resistance: we reach for our pockets and let Google fill the silence. We have replaced the flow of the pen and the resonance of the spoken word with the clickety-clack of keyboards and the cold, haptic feedback of Gorilla Glass.
We speak English for the global economy and Malay for the national identity. We are “okay to go by” with just enough vocabulary to survive. But in this rush toward a homogenised future, have you ever heard someone speak Vaie?
There is a silence growing in the Kemena basin. Vaie is an Austronesian language – a phonetic fingerprint of Bintulu – that is currently flickering on the edge of extinction. This is my hook, and it is a sharp one. We are standing at the juncture of a broken cultural transmission, living through a mass extinction event that has nothing to do with ecosystems and everything to do with the human mind.
The Largest Extinction Event You’ve Never Heard Of
Every two weeks, a language dies. With it goes an entire way of seeing the world – vocabulary with no translation, concepts that exist only in specific linguistic structures, and knowledge that was never written down because it was meant to be breathed.
Vaie is endangered. So is Bidayuh. So is Melanau. These are the languages our ancestors used to name the rivers, describe the seasons, and encode knowledge about the forest. These were not just “dialects”; they were the technologies of heritage. While we build apps to translate between Mandarin and English in real-time, we are watching our own legacy dissolve into the void of “useful” languages. This isn’t just about losing words; it is about losing the biological and spiritual source code of who we are.
When Borneo Rewrote History
For decades, global education claimed the “Great Leap Forward” began in European caves like Lascaux Cave, framing abstract thought as a Western birthright. But 40,000-year-old ochre paintings in East Kalimantan’s karst forests have reshaped that narrative. Long before agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, Bornean ancestors were thinking symbolically, documenting their world, proving the modern mind thrived in the tropics.
That lineage endured in the intricate Pua Kumbu and Sungkit, where geometric patterns encode cosmology, law, and history – you wear not just cloth, but a map of the heavens. It lived in Sarawakian shipbuilders who navigated the South China Sea without blueprints, guided by inherited knowledge. This is a 40,000-year chain of transmission – now at risk of breaking within a single generation.
Good Books, Dumb Books: The Education of an Editor
I was never the “bright” kid in school. I didn’t know who I was supposed to become; I just wanted to draw. I loved art because it felt like the only language that didn’t require a translation to be felt.
It wasn’t until the year 2000, during my first year at Universiti Sains Malaysia, that the gears finally turned. The textbooks began to explain what years of schooling never could. The context shifted, and for the first time, education became coherent. However, there was one lesson the system still failed to teach: the Genealogy of Media. We are taught how to use digital tools, but we aren’t taught the “bloodline” of how information moves through time. This matters because we are failing to teach our children who they are. We are killing them with the “obnoxious absence” of their own cultural identities.
The Mass Media Bloodline
If we view history as a family tree, our fractured era makes sense.
- The Grandmother (Oral Tradition): The root. Knowledge lives in story, song, and ritual, passed face-to-face. Limited in reach but perfect in fidelity, adapting in real time. In a Vaie longhouse, her voice is the ultimate technology.
- The Father (Print): The record. Truth fixed in ink. Print gave permanence and authority, preserving generations of intellect and memory.
- The Mother (Broadcast): The spectacle. Radio and television carried sound and image into homes – powerful, emotional, yet controlled by a few voices.
- The Child (Digital): The chaos. Infinite reach, infinite noise.
Amid the digital roar, the Grandmother’s ancient whisper fades – data everywhere, meaning nowhere.
What Dies with the Silence?
When a language like Vaie disappears, we lose cognitive diversity – the ability to think beyond a globalised mindset. Words like ‘pulai’ carry layered meaning: not just “to return”, but the tree that anchors a home. Adat is more than custom; it is a complex ecological and social contract with the land. By prioritising what seems “useful”, we sideline languages that hold vital environmental knowledge – how to read clouds, which roots cure fever. When the language fades, so does the forest’s pharmacy. Language loss happens quickly: from fluent grandparents to grandchildren who know only fragments. We are already at Generation Three, and transmission is unraveling.
Borneopedia: Reclaiming the Technology of the Soul
This is why I am building Borneopedia. It is not a museum; it is a digital bridge. We are using the “Child” (digital tools) to save the “Grandmother” (oral tradition).
We are creating a living archive of voices, weaving patterns, and shipbuilding techniques. This isn’t for academics; it’s for the teenager in Bintulu who wants to hear the “sh” of their ancestral tongue. The system will not save us.
National policy will not prioritise the Vaie. We must record ourselves. Spend ten minutes recording an elder.
Document the Adat. Because when a language dies, a world disappears.
P.S. Since newspaper space is limited, this is just the “lite” version. I’ve put the full deep dive over at Borneopedia, complete with linguistic maps and the timeline of our cave art.
Scan the code to hear the “Grandmother” speak.
With that … Isheh masha, Digital Zen tok, mabor ishih-ishih mian tauk.
(Until then, this Digital Zen is for those who ought to know.)
Scan here to enter Borneopedia.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
