PENAMPANG: The Kadazan Society Sabah (KSS) lodged a police report here, recently, over an article titled “Sabah’s ‘Kadazan’ barking up the wrong tree on government forms,” published in the New Malaysia Herald web portal in October.

The opinion piece by one Joe Fernandez said it is ironic that Kadazan speakers who have failed to preserve their dialect in habitual everyday use, to be listed as race, which was called for by the KSS in September.

Joe further claimed that it’s the Church that keeps the Kadazan dialect and other local languages and dialects alive.

“Kadazan speakers are not ‘race’. They are a form of identity which, unlike Malay – an aberration in law – isn’t in the Constitution.