I refer to the malaysiakini report Mengapa k'jaan tukar istilah Bahasa Melayu kepada bahasa M sia . This issue concerning Bahasa Melayu cannot be left unchallenged. It is first of all a legal issue as well as a human rights one. Legally, no country has the right to rename any language be it English or Malay.

The Americans had tried to do so by unofficially considering their brand of English as American-English. However, it did not take off and even in America now they still talk about English and not American-English as such. American-English is just for show; to tell the world that the Americans speak and spell in a language different from English.

It is also ridiculous for any American to insist that their American-English is more superior than the original English although it now seems that the Americans are the ones who are helping to expand the use of the language.

As for Bahasa Melayu, it is the language of the Malays and I mean all Malays regardless of whether they live in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, South Thailand, the Philippines and elsewhere where there are pockets of Malays such as in South Africa, Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, etc.

It is, therefore, ridiculous of the government - comprising a handful of Malay leaders - at one cabinet meeting last April, to totally obliterate the term. The term belongs to all the Malays and therefore it cannot be used in any other way or misused for political expediency by the governments of Malaysia as well as Indonesia.

Both the leaders of these countries must realise that by doing so they have degraded Bahasa Melayu and used it for other purposes. No wonder the language has failed to become an internationally accepted language. Universities outside these countries find it difficult when they want to set up a Malay Language Department as they have to depend on which country is sponsoring the department and call it according to that country.

The slogan 'Bahasa jiwa bangsa' is most apt and should be held in high regard since no race in the world can be respected as a race if it does not have a language of its own. The Chinese and Indians in Malaysia still have their own language or mother tongue, which surprisingly are not called Malaysian Chinese or Malaysian Tamil but just Chinese and Tamil.

But for the Malays, we do not have Bahasa Melayu anymore - a political decision has caused the term to be extinct. What is the Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage doing about it? He was aghast when Utusan Melayu which was written in the Arabic or 'Jawi' script was shut down. And he had the guts to bring the matter to the cabinet which approved a special grant to allow Utusan Malaysia to publish a side publication devoted to this script.

Why was he silent when the issue of Bahasa Melayu was discussed by the cabinet? Doesn't he know that the action to declassify the language and call it Bahasa Malaysia is sacrilegious? I will be keen to find out what the Malays outside of Malaysia will be speaking. Will it be Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Malaysia since they are not Malaysians?