National language policy: Problems and reality

Setiono, Jakarta

On Thursday, the nation commemorates Youth Pledge Day. In 1928, 17 years before the country's independence, a group of Indonesian youths pledged that Indonesia would become one country, with one nation and one language. During this day, people often talk about the need to protect the Indonesian language from foreign influences.

The persistent problem we have been facing in developing the lexicon of our national language is that there is no general consensus among language experts as to which languages we should adopt. Some prefer to use European languages, especially English, because English is deemed as the language appropriate to modern science and technology, industry, commerce, the media, and higher education.

Others, however, prefer to employ Sanskrit, Arabic and other foreign languages used traditionally in Bahasa Indonesia. This is motivated by the fact using these languages can maintain Indonesian tradition and cultures and promote a feeling of nationalism among the Indonesian people.

Methods for coining new terms from foreign languages such as English and Dutch into Bahasa Indonesia in the present have essentially not changed since the Japanese occupation in Indonesia. They are illustrated in the Indonesian Dictionary, Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI), which was published in 1996.

The KBBI says there are three ways to coin new words from foreign languages.

They are: To find the closest Indonesian equivalents, to find the equivalents from the indigenous languages such as Javanese, Sundanese, and Maduranese, to mention a few, and to adopt the European languages into Bahasa Indonesia which can be done in three different ways: (a) to adopt new words in accordance with the internal use, (b) to adopt new words due to their common usage, and (c) to adopt new words by translating them (either entirely or partially).

This policy, however, is not consistently applied in executing the planning of language. This particularly true when we observe many translated housing compound names that do not abide by these rules. Names such as Bogor Boulevard, Cimacan Valley, and Sahid Bali Seaside, to mention just a few, were translated into the ethnic-sounding Adimarga Bogor, Bantaran Cimacan, and Susur Sahid Bali, respectively. When the policy is implemented, one may find words such as adimarga, bantaran, and susur do have the standard Indonesian equivalents jalan raya, lembah, and tepian.

The adoption of local language equivalents for foreign words such as English may be disadvantageous because words taken from certain local languages are not known by speakers coming from other regions.

People coming form Central Java, for instance, might find it difficult to understand words taken from Sundanese, and thus must undoubtedly learn the origin of those words.

There is a tendency among language experts to forcibly replace the established English words, which have been nativized, into Indonesian words. This results in words and expressions that sound awkward, uneconomical and are unacceptable among language users.

The word "effective" and "efficient" might be more acceptably nativized into efektif and efisien than mangkus and sangkil. The expressions which have been commonly used, should be maintained as the way they are, rather than finding awkward Indonesian expressions masuk bursa and merambah mancanegara, as proposed by Anton Moeliono. Nobody will use those expressions since such expressions have not yet accepted by the language users. Why should we spend extra time finding the new expressions, while we already have the established and widely used expressions?

Often using English words puts an extra cognitive load on language users. The words might seem strange to them, and often they have recheck the meaning of the translated words to find the true meanings.

From the linguistic viewpoint, the meanings of English words are so distinctive that no lexical Indonesian equivalents can precisely replace them. Thus, though we can find the word suasana for "nuance" and kekurangan for "deficit", the meanings of the English words cannot be completely captured by their Indonesian equivalents.

Language planning hitherto does not seem to have been carried out systematically and objectively. It essential to emphasize here that planning manifests in a system, suggesting that any processes of language planning ought to be addressed in a systematic way.

At least two criteria should be considered in language decisions. The first is efficiency, referring to the state of being easy to learn and use, not being misunderstood, not being hard to remember, and not being more complicated than necessary. The second is acceptability, referring to the sociocultural rules of evaluation.

These two criteria should enable any language planner to make useful decisions in executing language programs.

The writer is a lecturer at the Atma Jaya Catholic University and can be reached at setiono.sugiharto@atmajaya.ac.id