While it is always good to restore English-medium schools because we need to master English and catch up with the first world, I would like to highlight the fact that the 'language nationalists' who did their utmost during the former prime minister's time to suppress English, also did a great disservice to Bahasa Malaysia (BM), which is a beautiful language and a world class one, too.

It is because they rammed BM down our throats and many of us learnt it out of fear of failing exams. As a result, many of us did not respect BM as a language and once we left school to enter the job market, we began to talk choppy BM, for example 'I mau pigi makan' and 'Mana you punya haus? (Which means 'Where is your house?').

Many of us felt, and still feel, that BM is a worthless language, a kampung language only good as a national language, and 'tak laku' outside Malaysia. This is the fault of the 'language nationalists', those who idolised (at least between 1969 and 1991) the most nationalistic education minister of all who later became our fourth and most brilliant prime minister.

They made us learn BM by killing off our mother tongues and English. They failed to educate us on why we had to learn BM. They brutalised us. Today, it is good that the government of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi wants to go all out to ensure that we Malaysians speak good English to compete at the global level.

It is good Abdullah's government is righting the wrongs of the previous administration's education ministers, including one Anwar Ibrahim, the darling of the 'language nationalists'.

Abdullah is restoring the sensible balance between English and BM which existed during the time of Abdul Razak and Hussein Onn. That was the time when I first went to school and the teachers made sure we students treated English as our right leg and BM as our left leg.

But it does appear to me that those of us who are happy to see the government restore English standards and encourage the use of Chinese for the good of the future generations, do not appreciate BM's role in the future world. We tend to see BM as a 'kampung' thing a la Thai, Tagalog and Khmer.

Frankly, we are now in danger of abetting those darn 'language nationalists' in killing off BM. BM is a world-class language, because of all the languages of the developing world, none has been historically as widespread a lingua franca as BM.

BM was used as a trade language as far away as Africa, Japan, Korea and the Pacific Rim area. It is the language of Asean and the language of Apec.

Apart from English, BM is also one of the easiest languages to master. True, BM is not yet recognised as a UN language. That is because, when the UN was founded, no BM-speaking country had gained independence yet.

What we can do to preserve BM as a world-class language is to speak and write it properly. All of us, from the VIPs down to the common man. We should not forget what we learnt in school. We should read in BM to brush up on our BM. We should also lobby for BM to be accepted as a UN language.

English is the language of the world. Chinese will be very important in the future, when China becomes co-ruler of the world alongside the White Man.

As for BM, it is the ideal language to unite the peoples of the developing world, and the language that can play the role of Robin if English is Batman.