"YOUR English is so good”. Many of us Malaysians, especially those who use English regularly, may have heard this at least once. And when we travel to English-speaking countries, it often continues.
During my early years in the United Kingdom in 2012, a kind British neighbour once said this to me. He meant it warmly, even noted that I spoke standard English, not a regional variety. He asked how I came to speak English so well. I smiled and explained that I learned it as a second language in Malaysia.
The moment stayed with me. Over time, what struck me more was how many native speakers spoke in ways that did not always match the English we were taught, or taught to revere, as proper: rarely textbook grammar, and often far from the formal “standard” we were trained to emulate.
This is not a critique of how they, or anyone, speak or use the language. Language is diverse and contextual. Rather, it is a reflection on how unevenly linguistic authority is distributed. Their English was never questioned. Ours often is.
That is what makes comments like “Your English is so good” feel more complicated than they seem. They may be well-intentioned (and often are) but they are rarely neutral. Such remarks carry the assumption that fluency or proficiency is surprising, even exceptional, when it comes from those who do not fit dominant expectations of what an English speaker should look or sound like.
This is not just about English. It is about who is allowed to speak without explanation and who is always expected to account for their voice.
I was reminded of how deeply this runs while attending Residential 2025: Applied Linguistics and the Global South – English and Other Problems at Lancaster University. Professor Ryuko Kubota’s talk, based on interviews with racialised students and instructors at a Canadian university, revealed patterns that felt immediately familiar: “compliments” that function as microaggressions, the pressure to sound “native,” and the subtle ways names, accents, and heritage languages become sites of judgement.
Though her research focused on Canada, much of it resonated with Malaysian realities - where language politics are just as layered and just as unequal.
In Malaysia, English occupies a complicated space. It is a colonial legacy, a class marker, a passport to global mobility and often, a quiet test of how “intelligent”, “modern” or “credible” someone is perceived to be. Yet fluency and proficiency are rarely judged on their own terms.
For instance, two people may demonstrate equal command of English, yet be heard and evaluated differently, depending not on what they say, but on how they sound, who they are, or how they are perceived. We are taught, often implicitly, that English spoken with certain accents is more legitimate, more impressive, more “correct”.
But most of us speak with accents shaped by our histories, our communities, and our multilingual lives.
Accent is not the opposite of fluency, and sounding local is not the same as sounding less capable. If someone speaks with a British accent, à la Simon Cowell or an American one shaped by media exposure, let them. If someone speaks English with a Malaysian accent shaped by the rhythms of Kelantanese or Terengganu Malay, let them too.
Accents are not errors to fix but traces of where we come from - shaped by contact, identity and history, not deficiency. Some of us carry traces of belacan or budu in our pronunciation and that, too, is English. The problem is not how we speak, but how our speech is filtered through racialised and classed expectations.
But the hierarchies do not end with English. Bahasa Melayu, while officially upheld as the national language, is often treated as the cultural property of the Malay-Muslim majority.
Chinese and Indian Malaysians are expected, even required, to speak it fluently, especially within the school system and state discourse. Yet when they do, their fluency is not always met with uncomplicated acceptance.
Comments like “You speak Malay so well!” may sound like praise but often carry an undercurrent of surprise - as though fluency alone cannot undo the presumption of ethnic distance. It is not that they are not expected to speak Malay - they are. But even when they speak it fluently, their command of the language is often treated as surprising, as if Bahasa Melayu is still something they had to acquire from the outside, rather than something they have a rightful, everyday claim to.
It remains coded as not fully “theirs”, even though they are expected to know it.
Meanwhile, when Malay speakers become proficient in Mandarin or Tamil, they may be met with raised eyebrows or half-joking questions like, “Eh, how come you tahu cakap ni?” These moments reveal that language, in these cases, becomes less about communication than about containment - a way to monitor who belongs where, and who might be crossing lines drawn by race.
These expectations are not just contradictory but also exhausting. Racialised speakers constantly navigate a shifting set of demands: to be fluent, but not too confident; to represent diversity, but not speak from it too loudly. The result is a kind of linguistic performance that never quite satisfies.
In classrooms, meetings, interviews and conferences, many of us have learned to edit ourselves mid-sentence, softening an intonation, recalibrating a register, sometimes not because we lack fluency, but because we anticipate judgement, or feel the unease of speaking under someone else’s expectations.
Names carry this burden too.
In a raciolinguistic system, names are not just identifiers - they are preloaded with assumptions. They shape how one’s English is anticipated, heard or judged before we have even spoken. In classrooms and job interviews, names often function as shorthand for linguistic competence, cultural capital and social value. They trigger expectations and limitations - about who is likely to be articulate, and who will be asked to prove themselves.
So, what does resistance look like? It looks like refusing to apologise for our accents. It looks like refusing to let our names be trimmed down or reshaped to fit someone else’s tongue. It looks like teaching, writing, and dreaming in Bahasa Melayu, Tamil, Mandarin, or any mix of the languages that shape us. It means rejecting the idea that English fluency or proficiency signals intelligence, or that one language should dominate our understanding of knowledge, worth, or modernity.
And it means recognising that when someone says, “Your English is so good” or “Your Malay is so good” or “Your Tamil is so good” or “Your Mandarin is so good” - they are not just reacting to language. They are reacting to who is speaking it.
And that is precisely the problem.
So, then we are allowed to ask: “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Siti Nurnadilla Mohamad Jamil is a linguist and discourse analyst whose research focuses on language, ideology, and the legitimisation of violence in media and political discourse. She is currently a Visiting Researcher at Lancaster University and an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the International Islamic University Malaysia. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sinar Daily.