Poklen Language: Does it exist?

Disclaimer: 

This study was made in 2013, and I am only releasing parts of the actual research as it was linguistic heavy and might be harder to digest the idea of what a Poklen Language is. Data and information stated in the below study may be outdated and I do welcome comments and suggestions to better understand this unique "subvariety" of Brunei English, if it can be considered as such. 

INTRODUCTION

The term Poklen is a unique Bruneian word to describe someone who is known to abuse the current fashion trend and someone who does not know how to express themselves in speech and writing proper Malay and English. According to Laalow (2009), it also describes “someone who is too arrogant to take of the ‘z’ and ‘x’ from any word” that they type in.

There is continuing debate over the origins of the term Poklen. One of the most popular claims was that the term came from Portland, which is a town or a city in the United Kingdom. Supposedly they were known to have a very bad football team and were branded as the losers. Unfortunately, this is not true because there is no such thing as Portland football team or club. So in other words, “the story is a complete myth” (Deterding, 2010).

A recent discussion with one of my former lecturers narrowed down to a theory saying that the term poklen might come from Folkland, which means “The land of Folk or People.” Being the remote community this seems logical as they are known as the village people or as Deterding (2010) refers it to as “country bumpkin”. There used to be a page on Wikipedia explaining the origin and definition of Poklen and it stated that, Poklen refers to  “the teenagers that resides in Kampong Ayer that likes to wear inappropriate and mismatched clothes” (Wikipedia, 2009). However, this is merely considered to be stereotypical. We assume that Poklen only refers to those who came from Kampong Ayer (Water Village) but in fact, it can be anyone from anywhere in Brunei for as long as you think they do not conform to the norm.

What really make Poklen interesting to study is not only how they are perceived by the society but also how the language that they are using seems to be the one thing that really gets people to talk. Therefore, this research aims to look into the Poklen Language in general.

Generally, most people assume that Poklen is someone who has a bad taste in fashion and uneducated; therefore, they are prone to commit grammatical error, both in speech and writing.

Poklen Language/ Poklen English: Does it exist?

This was the question that I have been pondering upon for a long time. The fact that people are aware of such thing as Poklen language means that it exists. The other question that lingers through my head is whether Poklen Language or Poklen English is a sub-variety of Brulish (Brunei English) or not. This also questions, does Brulish Exist?

Based on Kachru’s (1985) three concentric model of World Englishes, Brunei is said to belong in the Outer Circle as majority considers English as their second language instead of a foreign language. Furthermore, Brunei has a bilingual education system where both English and Malay are used as the medium of instruction. English is also practiced in daily conversation, and very often we hear people alter from Language A to Language B, or mixed the two languages in the same utterance. Code Switching in Brunei is referred to as Bahasa Rojak where the idea is quite simple; it’s like mixing different languages on the same plate.

One of the features of Brulish is the use of discourse marker Bah, “which is a distinguishing feature of Brunei Malay occurring in BrunE, both as standalone and as an utterance-final politeness solidarity marker” (Ozóg & Martin, 1996; McLellan & Noor Azam, 2012, p. 87). For example,

            “You should come to my wedding bah”        

(Ozóg & Martin, 1996; McLellan & Noor Azam, 2012, p.87)

Although some deny the existence of this variety of English in Brunei does not mean it does not exist and it may also lead to other sub-variety such as Poklen language. 

What distinguishes Poklen language and Brulish is that, Poklen language is a mixture of broken English and Brunei-Malay, whereas Brulish is simply a mixture of English and Brunei Malay. It is very informal and treated as a local in-group variety of English, something that only certain group of people can understand. However, grammatical deviation is to be expected in both varieties, except Poklen language seems to suffer more than Brulish itself. A poklen would exaggeratedly type in words that constitute a sentence of misspellings, mixed capitalisations of letter, and intentionally adding an “x” or a “z” at the end of each word, for example, the acronym LoLz meaning Laughing Out Loud + dysfunctional-Z and TanX which means Thank + X.  These deliberate deviations might have been for reasons of signalling identity or a marked community.

METHODOLOGY

The data for this study were collected from a couple of online Social Media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

Different people have different ways when defining what Poklen is. It could be from their appearance, their personality, attitudes or most common feature, their language. It is easier to spot a Poklen through their style of writing than through their spoken form, therefore, I had used these social media platforms to search for both.

As suggested by thisissoawesome (2011), who is a user on Urban Dictionary, he says that it is easy to recognize Poklens on Facebook as they have the tendency to use “undesirable profile name such as “Doubleonezerosix”, “Nineteenzerothree”, “thedeathcore”, “SiiSayangku”” and so on, but to be able to gain access to their profile takes a little more effort than just searching.

I have used YouTube to look for the speech form, and found a couple of videos, which were the top hits as they went viral in Brunei. The people in the video were once labelled as the most popular Poklen Idol, simply because of what they did or say, which to most people are labelled as poklen. The short speech from the video is then transcribed orthographically and analysed.

FINDINGS

As mentioned previously, the most distinctive characteristic of a Poklen is how they write or type, which appears to be rather intimidating for most people when they read it. These features will be discussed in this section, alongside with the data that had been collected.

Feature of Written Poklen Language

There are three top features that can be seen in Poklen language, which are:

• Mixed Capitalization
• Intentional Spelling Error
• Words Ending with an “X” or a “Z”

Mixed Capitalization

.o5 :     oMg wHy?

            don’t knOWszz

21 :      hE SaId I wUz sTuPidZ!! & hE said My NAmEz with a ‘ErZx’ aT te back iS eW!!

                                                                                   

 (The Kalok Production, 2009)

The transcript above was taken from a recorded chat conversation on MSN Messenger, which was then uploaded on YouTube. Mixed capitalization in this sense means there is a mixture of small and capital blocks of letter in the same word. Nobody knows for certain why one would type as such, as it is actually more time consuming to do but it can be assumed that this happened because a person might think it is cool and creative. Based on a personal experience, I used to think this was the current trend, and once you get used to doing so, it gets harder to break the habit as your fingers have gotten use to either press Shift or Caps lock on the keyboard.

Intentional Spelling Error

Here is a list of spelling errors that I have found:

/b/ to /v/ e. g.  Baby à Vavyy

/s/ to /c/ e. g. So cute à Cho cute

/c/ to /q/ e. g. Cute à Qute

/p/ to /f/ e. g. Palui à Falui

/s/ to /z/ e. g. Please à PliZ
/i/ to /y/ e. g. Like à LyK

I believe there are still so much more than just these, if only I was able to access to a lot more profiles on Facebook. Again, this finding raised the question whether mixed capitalization of letters and the intentional spelling error is simply a sign of creativity? Or they really do not know how to spell properly?

Words ending with an “X” or “Z”

Finally, we have the infamous “x” and “z” suffixes. The two overly used expressions, which do not seem to have any meaning at all, are Ahakz and Ehex. Poklen people have the tendency to add this at the end of their sentence for no specific reason, for example:

            a. I LyK yEw AhaKz aHakz

            b. WaT r U up 2? EheX

There is a possibility that these are substitutes to ‘Haha’ and ‘Hehe’ and to adhere to their creativity, they created these expressions and made it uniquely theirs.

            21:       nw… I Amzx LoSTcx!

            .o5:      lAmEx alSOz have to Bwuekx up.

            21:       hAiXx!! iDuNno lAhZxx..                  (The Kalok Production, 2009)

Someone who does not how to read Poklen language may not be able to interpret what the above transcription means, so to write it in standard spelling:

            21:       now.. I am lost!

            .o5:      Lame also have to break up

            21:       Ha! I don’t know lah.

Of course, ungrammatical sentences are to be expected, but to understand why x and z have to be added to every word is harder to explain. Nobody knows for certain why he or she did it but it may be just for the sake of adding it, or it adds a little more characteristic to their language, but one thing for certain is that a lot of people find this to be “extremely annoying”.

Spoken form of Poklen English

It is difficult to retrieve data for this part of the study, mainly because in order to know how a Poklen speaks, one must observe them from a distant where you can hear them talk. However, I came across a blog that tells you how to be a poklen, so here are few of the characteristics of spoken Poklen Language:

• Short sentences and straight to the point
• “Less rambling and more ‘ah’ and ‘awu’ grunts”
• Speak in very “loud tone of voice so everyone know you are around”
• Make sure to sound “karas” or tough because all Poklen are supposed to act like one.

     (Md Hadi Iskandar, 2009)

    

Unfortunately, I have no evidence to prove this but I had found two videos that went viral some time ago, and many claimed them to be as Poklen.

Zek-Zek Kachingz

Zek, or known as Zek-Zek Kachingz became overwhelmingly popular after his personal video dedicated to his girlfriend went viral in Brunei. His initial intention was to apologize to his girlfriend for changing his relationship status on Facebook, instead what he gained from it was an instant fame.

An extract from his video:

            “I want you to be a very happy person in the world. You know like . . . You are the Princess of the Earth, I want to be the Prince. . . so I beg you, please, please and please, please forgive me. . . I beg you please. I really really sorry. Banar banar me minta maaf, banar banar banar banar sebanar banarnya hubby minta maaf” (Tiger Lim, 2010)

Three things that trigger the video to be labelled as Poklen: Using ‘Princess of the Earth’ to describe his girlfriend, constant repetition of ‘please’ and ‘banar’ and of course, the use of the pronoun ‘hubby’ to refer to himself.

Tasya Sharidah

And then, we have Tasya Sharidah. A young girl based in Kuala Belait whose video went viral after she made a public confession regarding all the fake profiles on Facebook. Even before she started to speak, most people were already judging her based on her appearance; blonde hair and skanky outfit. Some may find her fashionable, but to a few others she is a Poklen.

            “Hi.. you guys it’s me, Tasya Sharidah. This video is about the real me, my lofe, my world. . . I wanna tell y’all, ada website ani . . . a. .  arah on skin nama profile nya Tasya Shabby atu is a fek, fek, fek, fek, fek fek. . . balsu”                                                                                                   

(Talking Aloud, 2011)

As seen from the extract above, Tasya was using informal language like “wanna” and “y’all”. She also mispronounced some words like “lofe” which I assume she meant “life” and “balsu” which is supposed to be “palsu.” Similar to Zek, Tasya Sharidah’s repetitive usage of the word ‘fek’ or fake was made fun of.

Attitudes towards Poklen Community

While I was going through Facebook to look for data, I came across several anti-poklen pages made by Bruneians, some of them are:

• Kau Poklen Wah! Gali Ku
• Lets team up and vanquish or erase the word “poklen”
• Don’t want to write ‘Kampung’ at my address ‘coz afraid you’ll call me Poklen
• Intolerance to aspirin, bimbos, poklens and lame jokes
• Mc’Extreme family are bunch of poklen and degusting people

There were so much more than what has been listed. It seems to me that the society perceives the Poklen community negatively, mainly because they feel that these Poklen people are ruining the good image of Brunei. There was even a comment that really took my attention, saying that if they read too much of Poklen language, they would eventually get a brain damage. One can debate that it is true, it takes a greater effort to process or understand what a Poklen has written but another could also say, Poklen are just trying to be creative with their style of writing. 

CONCLUSION

After spending hours, days and weeks trying to understand the phenomenon behind the unique Language of the Poklen community, I have come to understand that on the surface they may appear to be unpleasant but when observed carefully, they are actually very interesting.

What really defines a Poklen varies from one person to another. We can say that it is because of their physical appearance, their attitude, their language or even how they break the rules of the norm, but who to decide what should be on the norm and what should not?

Although I am not personally fond of Poklen, I do think they are linguistically creative. However, I disagree on how Poklen is said to be ruining the image of Bruneian society and that it should be banished because without them, then Brunei would be plain and there would be no variety in the people or community. Based on my personal experience, being a Poklen may only be a temporary phase a teenager undergoes due to lack of exposure to current trends and peer pressure, but humans are always evolving and changing because once upon a time, I was a Poklen too but today, I am a linguist.

On the other hand, I started to wonder if Poklen language is simply a variety of our local English, which is Brulish and if so, can we consider Brulish as the Higher Variety and Poklen English as the Lower Variety?

Due to several limitation such as unable to access certain Facebook profiles, lack of evidence on spoken discourse of Poklen Language/English and very little or no previous study on the language, these are all I could do in order to further understand what Poklen language is but this could only mean that it has open doors and opportunity for me and others to make further and in-depth research on the language.