Crossing the linguistic causeway: Ethnonational differences on soundscape attributes in Bahasa Melayu

Abstract

Despite being neighbouring countries and sharing the language of Bahasa Melayu (ISO 639-3: ▪), cultural and language education policy differences between Singapore and Malaysia led to differences in the translation of the “annoying” perceived affective quality (PAQ) attribute from English (ISO 639-3: ▪) to ▪. This study expands upon the translation of the PAQ attributes from ▪ to ▪ in Stage 1 of the Soundscapes Attributes Translation Project (SATP) initiative, and presents the findings of Stage 2 listening tests that investigated ethnonational differences in the translated ▪ PAQ attributes and explored their circumplexity. A cross-cultural listening test was conducted with 100 ▪ speakers from Malaysia and Singapore using the common SATP protocol. The analysis revealed that Malaysian participants from non-native ethnicities (▪) showed PAQ perceptions more similar to Singapore (▪) participants than native ethnic Malays (▪) in Malaysia. Differences between Singapore and Malaysian groups were primarily observed in stimuli related to water features, reflecting cultural and geographical variations. Besides variations in water source-dominant stimuli perception, disparities between ▪ and ▪ could be mainly attributed to ▪ scores. The findings also suggest that the adoption of region-specific translations, such as ▪ in Singapore and ▪ in Malaysia, adequately addressed differences in the ▪ attribute, since significant differences were observed in one or fewer stimuli across ethnonational groups. The circumplexity analysis indicated that the quasi-circumplex model better fit the data compared to the assumed equal angle quasi-circumplex model in ISO/TS 12913-3, although deviations were observed possibly due to respondents' unfamiliarity with the United Kingdom-centric context of the stimulus dataset. Furthermore, the alignment between Stage 2 listening tests and quantitative evaluation of attributes in Stage 1 revealed biases in the ▪–▪ dimension across ethnonational groups. This study provides insights into the perception of PAQ attributes in cross-cultural and cross-national contexts, facilitating the culturally appropriate adoption of translated PAQ attributes in soundscape evaluation.