learn Bidayuh

Did you know that in Bidayuh, there are no words for “blue” and “green”?

I guess these colours of nature are so much in abundance and normal to them that it never occurred to even have a term for the 2 colours. So everything else that is foreign does.

I’m also half-Bidayuh and it would be a waste to not know the language when my mother speaks it fluently. It’s a beautiful language and surely something that’s not receiving enough appreciation by youngsters. Only a small percentage of Malaysians today speak Bidayuh.

The other half of my heritage. I fear that it’s a dying language, considering that the government wants to standardize the language despite the fact that the many dialects are so subtly different that one village would not understand the other, even though they are considered of the same ethnic tribe.

Bidayuh is one of the indigenous tribes of Borneo, by the way.