KUCHING: The Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) is utilising various approaches to attract and empower youths to master the Malay language.
Sarawak DBP director Abang Haliman Abang Julai stated that opinions and suggestions from youths were important and welcomed in ensuring that activities and programmes planned would have an impact.
He said focus was given on youths, including those in primary and secondary schools, with cooperation from non-governmental organisations to conduct activities and programmes to benefit this group.
“The most active group in our society are youths thus DBP is in the process of making itself more appealing and relevant to the group by adapting to their interests. If you look at our social media platform, we have conducted all sorts of activities to attract youths.
“This is very important because they are the ones who will inherit the language and with hopes of disseminating high quality works, this is the focus at DBP.”
He was speaking during the question-and-answer session after the virtual announcement of winners for the 10th Anugerah Sastera Negeri Sarawak competition on Tuesday (July 6).
Abang Haliman pointed out that there was still a need to raise awareness about the various activities and programmes offered by DBP.
Having said that, he noted that to mobilise and improve the Malay language proficiency among youths required the involvement of society as a whole.
“There are always activities or programmes like talks and workshops that we conduct which revolves around improving the language skills such as the correct use of sentence structures and poems (pantun) among others on our social media platform.
“However, we require the support and concern from the society in order to achieve our objectives in the pursuit of empowering the Malay language among youths.”
