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.