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)