Previous literature on Malaysia have generally categorized speakers by ethnicity, but less has been discussed about variation within a particular ethnic group. This study explores this area by looking at the effect of language dominance and education on multilingual Chinese Malaysians’ production of Malay initial stops.

VOT measurements were taken from 2461 tokens across three groups of Chinese Malaysian speakers – Mandarin Chinese-dominant trilinguals (CD), English-dominant trilinguals (ED), and English-dominant bilinguals (ED-b) – alongside a control group of native Malay (NM) speakers. Education background was also controlled for: CD and ED speakers attended Mandarin-medium primary schools, while ED-b and NM speakers attended Malay-medium primary schools. Language dominance was assessed using the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) surveying speakers’ language history, usage, proficiency, and attitudes.

Overall, native-like productions of unaspirated /p,t,k/ and fully voiced /b,d,g/ were displayed by most speakers across all groups, but inter-speaker variation was also observed for non-native groups. An effect of education background was found for /b,d,g/ realizations with positive VOT (p<.001), 91% of which were elicited from CD and ED speakers, pointing to the influence of Mandarin-medium schooling. Similar effects, however, were not found for voiceless stops. Instead, a marginal effect was found for Malay attitude scores (p=.06). Higher scores, reflecting a more positive stance and greater perceived importance towards Malay, were associated with lower VOT values. No effects were found for overall Malay dominance and other scores within the BLP.

The results show that variation in voiced and voiceless stops pattern differently - while speaker variation in voiced stops are due to transfer from other languages, variation in voiceless stops are attitudinal, patterning with speakers’ opinions and ideals regarding Malay. These findings provide further insights as to how variation should be examined in a diverse speech community such as Malaysia.