Board set up to help cope with rapid language developments

Board set up to help cope with rapid language developments

JAKARTA (JP): The seventh National Congress on the Indonesian
language concluded on Friday by issuing an action plan which
includes the establishment of an advisory board to cope with
rapid change in the language.

Around 800 domestic and foreign experts who attended the five-
day congress discussed dozens of papers identifying obstacles to
the development of the language. Many of the discussions centered
on the influence of political oppression during Soeharto's New
Order regime on the development of the language.

The language advisory board proposed by the congress would
consist of linguists, scientists and public representatives with
an interest in language and literature.

"The board's duty would be to give advice, solicited or
otherwise, to the state Language Center to upgrade the role of
the center," said Hasan Alwi, who presided over the team which
drafted the congress recommendations.

The board will be formed shortly after the results of the
congress have been submitted to Minister of Education and Culture
Juwono Sudarsono, he said.

"It is expected to become a permanent board and will be
enacted by a ministerial decree."

"We are in a hurry here to cope with rapid developments in the
language as we approach the new millennium," Hasan said.
"Therefore the congress also calls for a national gathering to
revise the language policy first enacted 23 years ago in the 1975
national seminar on language politics."

Hasan cited technological terms such as 'computer' and 'mouse'
as examples of words which have been adopted into the Indonesian
language without much prior consideration.

"Rather than thinking hard to find the Indonesian words for
such terms, we simply started to use the words 'komputer' and
'mouse'... we could not possibly called (the latter) 'tikus' (the
literal meaning of mouse)."

The congress also called for a review of political elements of
the language and said it would introduce a list of 80,000 terms
made by experts from various disciplines.

Literature professor Sapardi Djoko Damono said, however, that
people tended to use words with which they were already familiar
and pointed out that the government would need to launch a
special campaign to promote new terms such as tengarai (suspect)
and mantan (former).

More popular versions of the two words are mencurigai and
bekas respectively. (edt)