11 Conclusions Multilinguality in the Malaysian Context of Nation-Building and Globalisation Renate Ka ¨rchner-Ober, Dipika Mukherjee and Maya Khemlani David Introduction The Southeast Asian region has been multilingual for many centuries, and consequently, plurilingualism and multilingualism has been the norm for Southeast Asians for centuries. More recently, Tickoo (2006: 168) has described language educational matters within the South Asian region as “shortsighted”, as they show “disregard for the sociocul- tural contexts of the languages in use and also for the forces that con- tributed to language maintenance and shift”. At the same time, the pre- sence of English and its varieties and functions in Southeast Asia has become a widely researched topic of scholars (Kachru & Nelson 2006). In present-day Malaysia, linguistic diversity can be described as a “5- C-situation”: contact, competition, cooperation, conflict and coexistence be- tween languages. In fact, Bateson (1972) describes Malaysia`s sociolin- guistic situation as schismogenic, as the relationship between languages is perceived to be more competing than complementing. Bahasa Malaysia has been designated a unifying language for Malaysians, who in essence comprise heterogeneous ethnic and religious groups. English was displaced in governmental and educational domains after Malaysia gained independence in 1957. Hence, today a dramatic decline in the standard of English can be observed. Apart from English, which is deemed the second most important language, other languages such as French, Arabic and German have been introduced in educational set- tings. The languages of the other communities – e.g. Mandarin and Tamil – have also been given emphasis in Malaysia (David 2003 and 2008b). However, as David states, “the emphasis on Malay, the National language, and also English as an international language, are seen as more important than time spent on learning the mother tongue […]” (David 2008b: 79). The complexity of this ethno-linguistic vitality and sociocultural heterogeneity raises a number of questions with