Minister wants bill on language

JAKARTA: The government is considering a draft of a bill to protect the national language as well as local languages, Minister of National Education Bambang Sudibyo said here on Saturday.

"The Ministry of National Education, through its language center, is studying the possibility of designing such a bill," he said after opening a dialog on Indonesian and Chinese cultures at Jakarta's Atma Jaya University.

The minister said such a bill was necessary amid the current interactions between Indonesian language and local and foreign languages.

"I see that the interactions have often hurt the Indonesian language, which means also hurting our culture. Therefore, we need to observe this process and how to guarantee that the interactions can continue in a good way," he added.

Bambang said he was of the view that the present world environment was a good chance for the Indonesian language to become a global language.

The proposed bill is also expected to help unite hundreds of ethnic groups and tribes scattered across Indonesia, he added.

However, he said he would reject the draft if it curbed the development of foreign languages in the country, such English and Mandarin, which many Indonesians speak. -- Antara