My variables have English names. My feelings have Malay ones. Somewhere in between sits the entire working life of a Malaysian software engineer.
Code is English. Not just the keywords, which we never chose, but the whole culture around it: the docs, the error messages, the Stack Overflow answers, the commit history. I have written isEligible and retryCount ten thousand times. I have never once written a variable name in the language I dream in.
The switch
The context switch is so constant it becomes invisible. A standup happens in Malay, drifts into English the moment a technical noun appears, and drifts back for the joke at the end. “Eh function ni return null la when the user belum verify.” Nobody in the room finds that sentence strange. It is one sentence, in one language: ours.
Writing is where the split gets sharp. Technical writing happens in English because the vocabulary lives there. But explaining the same system to a friend in Malay is the real comprehension test. English lets me hide behind terminology. Malay makes me say what the thing actually does. If I cannot explain my architecture in the language I grew up with, I have memorized it, not understood it.
What English precision costs and buys
Early in my career I worried my English was not good enough: not fancy enough for design docs, not smooth enough for meetings with foreign clients. It took years to learn that engineering English is not literature. Nobody is grading your prose. The bar is precision, not polish.
“The API returns stale data after the cache expires” is perfect engineering English. It has no style. It needs none. Some of the clearest technical writers I know speak English as a third language, and their docs are better than the native speakers’ because they cannot afford to be vague. Vagueness is a luxury of fluency.
What Malay keeps
Malay is where the human parts of the job live. Frustration is Malay. Celebration is Malay. The 11pm voice note to a friend about a cursed bug is Malay with English nouns floating in it like debris. And mentoring hits different in Malay: watching a junior finally get pointers because someone explained it in the language their brain relaxes in, that is a thing English could not have done.
I used to think of the two languages as work mode and life mode. That is not quite right. They are more like different instruments. English is the precision tool: naming, specifying, documenting. Malay is the resonance tool: understanding, teaching, belonging. A career needs both played well.
So my advice to every Malaysian engineer who feels self-conscious in English meetings: your accent is not a bug, and your English does not need to be beautiful. It needs to be exact. Spend the effort there.
And never lose the other instrument. The engineer who can explain a distributed system in pasar Malay over teh tarik understands it better than the one who can only recite the English definition. I would bet the bill on it.