Forging cultural identity through language

Forging cultural identity through language

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): Have you ever changed your language? Your
working language, for instance? If so, did you notice any changes
within yourself?

I had never thought this until recently when I encountered a
short article about what it means to change one's language. The
article was about someone who changed his language from "black
English" in his childhood to "educated English" in his adult
years.

At first it seems changing language, which actually means
changing the linguistic system of one's mind, must be a dramatic
event, even though most people who undergo such a change do not
realize it.

Guy Bailey is a black linguist at the University of Nevada in
Las Vegas who has studied for many years the phenomenon of
Ebonics or Black English Vernacular (BEV). This is the variety of
English spoken by many urban blacks in the U.S. In the view of
many, including the Board of Education in Oakland, California,
Black English is not English, but a "West and Niger-Cango African
Language Systems." The Oakland Board of Education does not order
its schools to teach Ebonics but insists they understand BEV and
use it to help black students learn "educated English".

This policy has created much debate, but most of these debates
ignored the findings of linguistic research that has been done
over many years. One linguist, Walt Wolfram from the University
of North Carolina, says over the past 30 years Black English has
become the most heavily investigated variety of English. Guy
Bailey says these studies have contributed much to understanding
how languages change and develop.

An article was published in the March 1997 edition of
Scientific American. It was written by W. Wayt Gibbs in San
Francisco. Among other things, Gibbs discussed some of the
controversies about Black English. One was whether BEV is a
variety of English. Salikoko S. Mufwane from the University of
Chicago disagrees with the Board of Education in Oakland. He says
defining a language should be left to that language's speakers
and he is sure that if we ask black Americans what language they
speak, they will all answer "English!". This means Ebonics or BEV
or Black English is English.

The second controversy Gibbs tackled was whether Ebonics is
slang or a dialect. Some critics say it is slang. But linguists
generally consider it a dialect.

"Slang refers to a specialized lexicon of words that are
exclusive, and that tend to have a short life cycle," Wolfram
says. "'Groovy' is slang, but 'he done gone' is not." Mufwane
represent the general view among linguists when he says that as a
dialect, Black English is as systematic as Southern English,
Appalachian English or Standard English -- which really means
'educated English'.

Is Black English still diverging from mainstream English?
Again opinion differs. Wolfram argues that for every feature of
Black English that looks diverging, there is a feature that is
converging. John Baugh, a linguist from Stanford University,
thinks that what looks like diverging features of Black English
are essentially forms of 'linguistic defiance'.

One part of the article on Black English was how it feels to
move from Black English to educated English.

Guy Bailey says "I grew up in southern Alabama and was the
first person in my mother's family to go to high school. When I
went to college and started speaking educated English, there was
a sense in which I was seen as betraying my culture. To educate
people from an uneducated background successfully, you have to
understand that they are going to pay a price for speaking
differently. Telling them that they are just wrong is not the
best way."

This part of Gibbs' story made me realize that I had changed
language several times in my life. The first important change was
when I lived in a dormitory with friends from Malay speaking
regions like Palembang, West Sumatra, Riau, Makasar and
Pontianak.

In this dormitory we talked Dutch during the "study hours" and
Malay during the "off hour". Here I gradually learned to speak
Malay the Malay way, and not the Javanese way.

The second change was when I moved from Yogyakarta to East
Java during the Japanese occupation. Gradually I changed my daily
language from the variety of Javanese spoken in Yogyakarta to the
East Javanese variety. This was a big change at the time and I
felt liberated from all the feudal linguistic mannerism of the
Yogyakarta variety.

The third change took place gradually between 1957 and 1970,
when I changed my "working language" from a combination of
Indonesian and Dutch -- I worked until 1944 primarily with Dutch
educated colleagues -- to Indonesian and English, and finally to
English and Indonesian.

I never thought about how these changes influenced my way of
thinking and feeling. I knew only that gradually I began to
develop aversion to over-polite letters. I also began to dislike
long compound sentences, and began to prefer shorter sentences.
Gradually, I began to like a language style which is clear,
economic, and eloquent.

I do not know how many living languages there are in
Indonesia. I know only that there are many dialects of
Indonesian. Looking at this linguistic panorama we can say that
there is unity in diversity in regards to language systems in
Indonesia.

And we have been facing the problem of how to create a balance
between unity and diversity. The general feeling is that we have
given too much attention to unity, while neglecting the problem
of creating an atmosphere of harmonious diversity.

Can our language be used as an instrument to solve this
problem? If it is true that language influences ways of thinking
and feeling, then it should be possible. After all, being united
in the face of diversity is a matter of feeling and thought. The
question is what do we really mean by living in the spirit of
unity in diversity?

The writer is an observer of social and cultural issues.