WHEN you speak to a Malaysian you will notice the suffix "lah" frequently occurs in conversation. What's all this, then?

"Lah" is a suffix in Bahasa Malaysia that is meant to add emphasis to a word or phrase. "Just do it" for example, would roughly translate into "Buat sahaja" but more forcefulness would be obtained by adding the suffix, e.g. "Buatlah sahaja".

If someone knocks at the door and you invite them in, the polite way to say that would be "Sila masuk", or "please come in". If, however, you've said it once and the person is still knocking, you just say "Masuklah" for emphasis and to tell the blur case (see our upcoming lexicon of Malaysian slang) that you heard him in the first place. There are thousands of other examples but we hope you get the drift.

Anyway, the suffix has been absorbed into English in the local vernacular, more commonly in the peninsula than over in Sabah and Sarawak, and is used millions of times a day throughout the country - sometimes purposefully, sometimes for no reason at all.

When you fail to show up for work on time and the boss chews you out, a typical defence might be "Sorry boss, tired-lah."

If someone is getting a little too uptight about something, the appropriate caution to him would be "relax-lah" or "steady-lah", which urges the person to chill out, calm down, stay frosty, cool off. See? Everybody needs slang.

While purists continue to mourn the so-called "dilution" of spoken English with such colloquialisms, it is part and parcel of Malaysian life and nothing seems able to dislodge it. Stuck-lah!