Guess What? Iem G. Ross

Guess What? Iem G. Ross

"I must admit if I hear older Indonesians speaking Dutch, they speak it beautifully. They speak it correctly and maybe better than me," said Dutch Counselor for Cultural and Press Affairs Iem G. Ross.

"Well, they remind me of the generation of my grandfather because they spoke in such a way too," Ross, who is also director of the Dutch Cultural Center Erasmus Huis, told The Jakarta Post recently.

Today, Dutch spoken in the Netherlands has developed and undergone so much change, while older Indonesians, who studied it at schools like Hogere Burger School in colonial times, follow old Dutch.

"That is the reason older Indonesians sometimes say that the younger generation, who study the language at university, speak 'bad' Dutch," Ross said, adding that in fact they also speak properly.

"And, the good thing in Indonesia is although my Bahasa Indonesia is only sedikit because I've been here only one-and-a- half years, I can speak in Dutch to people like former Minister of Education and Culture Fuad Hassan and also to Pak Wardiman, the current Minister of Education and Culture," he explained. (als)