An Equal Language

A friend of mine frequently rails against the numerous pronouns we have in Malay and how this perpetuates the feudal mentality among Malay speakers. For the first person alone, we have several words, ranging from the casual aku to the royal beta. We also have a few words for the second person like kau, kamu and awak, but since it is considered rude to address people directly in the second person unless you know them very well or are deliberately trying to be rude, the use of these words is limited. The Malay speakers' obsession with politeness and social decorum has engendered a situation where the English word "you" could be translated in more than 20 ways into Malay, all depending on the social status and age of the person being addressed.