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 Data and information stated in the below study may be outdated and I do welcome comments and suggestions to better understand this unique "subvariety" of Brunei English, if it can be considered as such.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”
.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/ 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.