Twelve so-called loan words often peppered into Malaysia and Singapore English have made it into the Oxford dictionary, including the colloquial Malay expression alamak, popular dish nasi lemak and tapau – a Cantonese-derived word meaning to take away food.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) calls them “untranslatable words” – those that do not have English equivalents – that have been imported into the English language by speakers to fill a “lexical gap”.
“Sometimes, they do this with enough frequency that the borrowed word eventually becomes part of the vocabulary of their variety of English,” executive editor Danica Salazar wrote on the OED website on Thursday.
Alamak, a commonly heard interjection, was a surprise entry in the quarterly update.
“A category of words that often defy direct translation are exclamations that express different emotions,” Salazar wrote.
“An example of such an interjection is alamak [earliest seen 1952], one of the new words from Malaysia and Singapore included in this update. Borrowed from Malay, this colloquial exclamation is used to convey surprise, shock, dismay, or outrage.”
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