Bureaucracy affects press language

By Ignas Kleden

JAKARTA (JP): A seminar titled "The role of the mass-media in promoting the Malay-Indonesian language" recently examined bureaucracy and its influence on language and the media. The seminar, organized by the Association of Indonesian Journalists (PWI) and featuring experts from Malaysia and Brunei Darusalam, was held in Bandar Seribegawan on March 3-4.

The debate raised some interesting points, two of which appeared in the Kompas daily (March 5 and March 6) and deserve attention. First, what kind of linguistic relationship exists between government officials and bureaucrats on the one hand, and journalists and professional linguists on the other? Second, how can we find a modus vivendi between the standardization and the development of language? And who is responsible for each of these things?

Let me try to deal with the two questions, not as a professional linguist but as an active user of the Indonesian language. Journalists and the mass media have been accused of distorting the use of the Indonesian language. This is due to two factors. On one hand, journalists are subject to the journalistic genre. Rosihan Anwar, a senior Indonesian journalist, has said on many occasions that this genre is basically characterized by the "language economy". This means sentences are as short as possible or as long as necessary. The style should be simple or as sophisticated as necessary. Superfluous words which are used only for ornamental purposes should be eliminated. The use of prefixes, suffixes and other auxiliary terms should also be avoided.

In this way, journalistic language tends to be precise, less beautiful than literary language, and less sophisticated and less formal than scientific language. Language economy is intended to serve the reporting of facts and not opinions or analysis. This often creates the impression that journalistic language is monolithic. But with such simplicity and clarity, does journalistic language become an efficient and effective language, or a poorly truncated from of correct and beautiful language?

This situation is still aggravated by the fact journalists have to convey what is said by their informants. In the case of the Indonesian press, most of the informants are government officials or high-ranking bureaucrats who are known for using language with a lot of linguistic distortion in phonetics (the pronunciation of suffix (kan as ken), syntax (the use of superfluous daripada), or even in semantics (the use of excessive euphemistic forms or abbreviations, which are not always publicly known).

Here we are faced with some difficulties, both journalistic and linguistic. If journalists have to report on what their informants say, they have to choose either to stick to what was said or to reshape what was said and run the risk of changing the substance of the story. Be that as it may, the habit of using high-ranking officials as the main source of information has led to a situation where bureaucratic language exerts a powerful and immediate influence on the use of journalistic language.

In contrast to this, are journalists who do their best to gain access to the event as it unfolds. These journalists have relatively more freedom to use the journalistic genre as they want to. But if the Indonesian media is more inclined to report statements than facts, and if most of the statements are still from government officials, it is very unlikely the media will get rid of bureaucratic language. One can therefore appreciate a statement by former Indonesian journalist Mochtar Lubis, who on the occasion of his 75th birthday said: "If I was still an active journalist today, I would write more about the common people, instead of government officials going on same safari." (The Jakarta Post, March 7).

The now defunct Tempo magazine was one among the very few which consciously structured an alternative to the bureaucratic use of language. The journalistic essays of Goenawan Mohamad for example, which were widely known as Catatan Pinggir, were certainly far more literary than just journalistic pieces and by no means bureaucratic.

The habit of using government officials as the main source of information does not matter much as long as they are able and accustomed to using the standardized Indonesian language, which should be the language of government administration. In the case of Indonesia, officials are inclined to imitate language mistakes committed by their bosses. In turn, these mistakes are also made by journalists reporting on the statements of those officials. But the question is why are language mistakes so easily disseminated and internalized among officials? The answer should be sought not in linguistics but rather in language behavior.

Language in general, and the Indonesian language in particular, is not only a means of communication but also an attribute of identity. According to an old Malay saying, Bahasa menentukan bangsa (the way one speaks indicates where one comes from). The language of bureaucracy is also an attribute of power. Those who work within bureaucracy tend to internalize the language used by their colleagues, and particularly their bosses, in order to identify themselves as members of the bureaucracy. Since bureaucracy is a mechanism to implement power, bureaucratic language (including all the mistakes) plays an important role in showing one's participation in wielding power. In other words, language mistakes easily become a part of society because they are an effective status symbol.

The only way to improve the situation is not to blame journalists for the mistakes in their reporting, but to introduce a new awareness among our bureaucrats that an appropriate status symbol for them is not bad language but correct language, as is the case with all modern bureaucracies. It is worth considering whether or not using standardized Indonesian should be included as a precondition to recruit someone who wants to join the bureaucracy. Another solution is to encourage journalists to depend less on official statements, and instead rely on direct access to facts and events in their reports.

But the problem also questions the relationship between the standardization of language and the development of language. This is a point of heated debate which is still raging among professional linguists. The question is: should language be organized and standardized in accordance with syntactical rules which are established by professional linguists, or should language be left to the creativity of its users? If we take the first choice, we are easily subject to the domination of some linguistic experts while ignoring what is happening among language users. If we take the second choice, we are easily led to a situation where there are no rules at all. The development of language is dependent upon the whim of its users, and all the mistakes are justified simply because they are widely accepted.

At this point the linguistic question turns into a philosophical one: is language normative or empirical by nature? I would argue, language is basically empirical, but we can look at it and even criticize it in terms of some norms. However, the norms which are to be applied should be open to discussion and review, where all the syntactical normative rules, are taken from the standardized syntax of Latin or Greek, as is the case with the traditional grammarian school.

In reality, this means there must be some rules to allow people to orient themselves in language, though these rules must be open to correction and modification, just like language must be open to improvement and innovation. Language should not only be standardized, it also needs to be developed. It is subject not only to regulation, but also to innovation and creativity. However, the creativity and development of language should be based on a minimum mastery of its rules. One can swerve from the existing rules in order to enable a new creation in language (for example through new metaphors, or through new syntactical structure), but this should only be carried out responsibly. Language should not be created in contrast to or even despite the rules, and not because of neglect of just because of the ignorance of the rules.

To quote the golden formula of Noam Chomsky, the performance of language users should be a realization of the competence of the language and not evidence of a lack of language competence.

The writer is a sociologist based in Jakarta.