Reconfirming (In)directness Preference of Request Strategies among the Malays

Studies have established a correlation between indirectness and politeness; one of them being that a higher level of indirectness indicates a higher level of politeness. Among traditional Malaysian Malays as an instance, indirectness is highly valued as it reflects a cultured and refined upbringing which has been upheld as a way of living at every level of the society. However, Malaysia has seen changes and transformations in many ways - in its physical and cultural development, in the values and in the way of speaking, though the latter has not been much documented empirically. This sets the aim of this paper, which is to empirically document this transformation in the way of speaking that involves indirectness, by focusing into the production of requests by a group of 36 young Malaynative speakers. Request is one of the common speech acts in interactions, yet highly face-threatening therefore requiring certain politeness strategies for its execution. Writings about the Malay norms pointed to indirectness as the popular style of this speech act among the Malay speakers. For this paper, the participants of the study were asked to role play nine types of requesting scenarios which were then analyzed following the framework by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). The results showed that the participants adopted all three super strategies of request. However, there was a significant preference for Direct Strategy at all of the settings despite power-control and social distance factors. The speakers’ directness in performing requests was delivered through three sub-strategies, which are Want statement, Hedged performative and Mood derivable. Overall, the findings of the study indicated that there is a change in the pattern of discoursefrom the conventional Malay speaking style. The findings empirically signify a wave oftransformation in the Malay cultural values among the new generation of Malay andcall for further research to establish a more extensive discussion on the implications for such indication to modern Malaysia.