We Speak Multiple Languages

And we are proud to be Malaysians indeed, aren't we? Everywhere we go, we use Bahasa Melayu(BM) as our medium of communication. Be the conversation verbal or non verbal, BM will always be our ultimate option to be used - well at least for most of us. Because we are heavily influenced by our first language, we are not aware of the large amount of misuse of English in our country. Lets take a look at this one.

The line at the bottom of the board says ‘ALL ARE WELCOME’, when it 

is supposed to be written as ‘ALL ARE WELCOMED’.

First and foremost, this is an example of a passive voice.  The sentence above is in a simple present tense form, and as for the passive of the simple present tense, we have to use verb-to-be (am/is/are) + past participle. In the sentence 'ALL ARE WELCOME', are is the verb with welcome supposedly functioning as the past participle. What can be pointed out here is the tense form of the word welcome. It is a MUST to use past participle whenever it comes to passives. The past participle for the word welcome is welcomed. Hence, the right way to write the sentence would be 'ALL ARE WELCOMED'.The active voice would sound like this ; The church welcomes everyone. In addition, welcomed is categorized as bound inflectional, since the suffix -ed is used rather to indicate the changes in tense form. 
On top of that, in terms of agreement, the verb are agrees with the subject all, mind the plural form. In fact, the form of the verb can also be described in terms of tense as well. This would be much interesting since we are playing with the verbs. Well, the verb welcome here plays the role in changing the tense form. In this case, welcomed has become the past participle, but if we change it into the active voice as in the church welcomes everyone, then of course welcomes will be in simple present tense. Sentence structure-wise, the sentence does not agree with the SVO at first, but if it changes into all are welcomed, then all will become the subject, are will be the linking verb and welcomed functions as the complement.

*SVO : Subject Verb Object

There are many other mistakes spotted on the signboards, free advertisements, and even label on the goodies. Learning the right way to use English brings no pain. As we showered much love for our mother language, we should respect others too.

Coffee break now :)