M A C V A Y S I A

I know my mother’s going to be calling because this morning I read a story on my favourite Canadian news site about the floods that have been making life nasty in parts of Malaysia. I’m assuming there was a short soundbite on the TV news as well. For everyone outside of Malaysia, here’s the scoop: everyone’s OK. It’s supposed to rain like crazy today in Selangor and the Klang Valley, but hopefully we won’t experience the scale of flooding they got hit with in Johor and elsewhere. In Muar, Leen’s hometown, things are fine except for a wonky water supply, but that’s OK because the in-laws came to stay with us last night so we can all attend yet another wedding on Sunday (I have no idea when Leen will run out of single cousins). The parents of my brother-in-law’s wife, Tipah (I guess that would make her my sister-in-law), had to move to higher ground because their kampung house in Pagoh got swamped.Tipah and Leen’s brother won’t be coming for that wedding.

Anyway, the news coverage of the floods highlighted a little language point that always bothers me. The same photo can be seen at both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation site and also the New Straits Times site. What’s interesting is the slight difference in the captions. On the CBC site:

Railway staff inspect tracks damaged by floods in Segamat, in the southern state of Johor, Malaysia, on Friday.

On the NST site (and in their print edition):

A railway staff inspecting part of a track damaged by floods in Segamat.

Now, some might think the difference is that the NST chose to focus on the man in the foreground while the CBC included the ones in the background. But that isn’t why the descriptions are different. They’re different because, in Malaysian English, one person can be referred to as a staff, whereas in Canadian/American/British and just about every other variety of English, staff is a collective noun.

In standard English, staff can indeed be either singular or plural. But if used in the singular it can only refer to a group. A staff, then, cannot be just one person (unless that one person just happens to be the only member of a particular staff, but that use is restricted to certain cases). However, the use of the word staff to identify or describe a single person is widespread in Malaysian media. The same is true of the word personnel, which is often used in Malaysia to refer to one person when in fact it can only refer to a group (its use in standard English is even more restricted than staff, as it can never be singular).

I’m 75% tempted to just dismiss these quirks of Malaysian English as incorrect use of the language, but there’s still that other 25% telling me to simply accept them as just that: Malaysian English, and therefore perfectly acceptable. The rules governing singular/plural/collective/mass nouns can be incredibly complex, so it can’t be that unreasonable to think different—and equally valid—ways of using them might arise in different places where English is used. Perhaps staff and personnel can be Malaysia’s gotten (apples and oranges, I know, but I think my meaning is clear).

Well, maybe it’s not 75-25. More like 95-5. But I’m trying to be nice about it because I’m willing to give Malaysians the benefit of the doubt. I mean, I prefer to think of the frequent sightings of such uses of staff and personnel in Malaysian English papers as the natural evolution of a distinct variety of English, because the only other option is to assume that the editors of the Star, NST, Sun, and other papers consistently let glaring grammar mistakes slip by them.

(By the way, in spite of everything I’ve just said, I’m pretty sure the title of this post is grammatically correct. Go figure.)