This paper addresses the issues of language shift among the minority Sri Lanka Malay communities in Sri Lanka, not only to English, the obvious protagonist in such scenarios, but most recently to another metropolitan language relevant to them, Standard Malay.

The diasporic Malay communities of Sri Lanka are characterized by a unique language, Sri Lanka Malay (SLM), radically restructured through extended, intimate contact with Sinhala and Tamil, and recognised as mixed language of trilingual base in which Sinhala and Tamil grammar and colloquial Malay lexicon merge (Ansaldo 2006). In a country plagued by a conflict built on ethnolinguistic divides, with a majority Sinhalese and a powerful Tamil ‘minority’, SLM is a small, unofficial minority language in a stage of endangerment. Constituting just 0.3% of the population, the Malays of Sri Lanka are an extremely vulnerable community in the sense of Hyltenstam and Stroud (2005).

While the Malays have always tended to be effectively multilingual in SLM and the country’s two dominant languages, Sinhala and Tamil, in recent years, different degrees of loss of their vernacular can be noticed. The first shift is to English: with the 1987 Sinhala Only education policy, the community, particularly in Colombo, chose to switch to English in the home domain. The more recent tendency is the focus of our paper: the community’s desire to acquire Standard Malay. In the Colombo community, with higher education and socioeconomic status, there is a strong sense of identity and in recent years a strong drive for language revitalisation. Receiving greater recognition from the Malaysian High Commission than from their own country, it is there that they seek support and find their identity, and the choice consequently is for Malaysia’s Standard Malay. In Kirinda, a small fishing village with low economy and high unemployment, the belief is that its acquisition will allow them to plug into the global economy. This shift can be seen as a way in which to (a) gain a useful economic tool and (b) preserve and represent their subject position through an assumed global Malay identity – in the sense of Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004) – recognizable through an empowered linguistic identity, and recognized by the Malay ‘homeland’.

This trend of shift towards a recognized standard in which cultural and economic functions of language come together can be interpreted as a consequence of multilingualism and globalisation as a resource – rather than as a threat – to enable a minority group to gain access to better education and enhanced political self-representation. This case study suggests the following observations:

(1) Global/ metropolitan languages can function as means of empowerment for minority voices.
(2) Structural diversity may not necessarily protect a variety from undergoing shift.
(3) Documentation may not be the only response for the enhanced representation of vanishing