Preparing bahasa Indonesia for the new millennium

By Setiono

JAKARTA (JP): A two-day seminar on the politics of national language held recently in Cisarua, Bogor, south of here, reflects an awareness of the urgency in preparing bahasa Indonesia to face the new millennium, with the uncontrollable influx of foreign languages.

The seminar, which was carried out as a follow-up of the 8th Language Congress held in 1998, was intended to reevaluate and to revise the national language policy. The policy is no longer deemed suitable in meeting the needs and interests of Indonesia's modern society. This suggests that the society using the language plays a paramount role in the process of language development.

In this regard, the language planning agency which is represented by the Center for Language Development should embrace the society's aspirations related to language development.

The fact that Indonesian language planning has never been successful may stem from two fundamental reasons. First and foremost, Indonesian language planners failed to take into account the crucial variables of language planning that include the role of nongovernment agencies, and most importantly the role of aspirations voiced by the general public.

In other words, language planners adopted the top-down approach in every process in language planning, and did not provide any room for society members to participate in any decision-making.

Second -- and a point which is related to the first area -- in the planning stage language policy is determined solely by bureaucratic agencies, and consequently, the byproducts of language planning might not reflect the needs and interests of the community.

The legitimacy of planning products or outcomes is less likely to be acknowledged by the language users unless a significant proportion of the population perceives it as meeting their needs and interest.

Language planning theory affirms that any language problem process should consider not only purely linguistic aspects but also social components in which the language is used.

Rubin and Jernudd (1971) explicitly assert that in order to be meaningful and productive, language planning needs to specify in detail what kind of language planning would be useful under what circumstances and for what kind of people speaking what kinds of languages.

Thus, it is obvious that language planning cannot be isolated from its sociolinguistic environment, which has the potential to provide significant feedback for the planning that has been executed.

As a language planning agency, the Center for Language Development should become a societal institution instead of an institution which was part of a bureaucratic component of a governmental organization.

Past experience provides evidence that such an institution has no control over language use among elite bureaucrats. As a result, the practice of manipulating and engineering the language became rampant. As such, the center functioned as a sterile language institution.

The misuse of language for bureaucratic purposes has in fact created stagnancy within society. According to Daulat P. Tampubolon (1999), the manipulation and propaganda in using a society's language may cause what he calls "the death of a language".

Tampubolon classified several symptoms in the Indonesian mass media. These were linguistic repression, referring to the repression and limitation in expressing one's thoughts and feelings through the language; semantic monopoly, referring to the monopoly of words, sentences, and discourses containing political thoughts; excessive use of acronyms, referring to the process of the creation of a word through confusing acronyms; and importation of foreign languages, denoting the excessive adoption of foreign languages which do not conform with the Indonesian language system.

As for the importation of foreign languages, it should be noted with caution that the arrival of foreign languages is a natural and inevitable language phenomena. There seems to be no valid proof that an imported language will cause the "death of a language".

The adoption of foreign languages into the Indonesian language are explicitly stipulated in the word-coining policy, and thus is not against our language policy. On the other hand, the arrival of foreign languages will eventually enrich the Indonesian language lexicon.

However, what concerns us here are the first three symptoms mentioned above. Linguistic repression may discourage and erode our society's creative and critical thinking. It may eventually make members of society reluctant to communicate their creative ideas and thoughts in both spoken and written language, and prompt them to take everything for granted as the truth. As a result, they will show their indifference to social issues and take everything for granted.

Similarly, a semantic monopoly and the use of excessive acronyms may contaminate the Indonesian language. Accordingly, such a move might lead to a "semantic deterioration": a shift in meanings from ones that possess good connotations into ones possessing the worst connotations.

All the accounts above imply the urgent need to form "community based planning", in which the representatives of the community are actively involved in the process of language planning and decision-making.

In an attempt to build a critical and innovative community, this type of planning may offer significant benefits. They are:

* as language planning takes place in the context of political planning, community-based planning can be used to control and monitor the misuse of language among the elite bureaucrats. It is important to note here that apart from its power to unify a diverse society, language may, if used improperly, have the potential to disintegrate a diverse population.

* the collaborative work between the language center and nongovernment agencies represented by all segments of language users (including groups of journalists, media commentators and language teachers) is more likely to produce beneficial and desirable effects. Empirical research provides evidence that nongovernment agencies disseminate vocabulary with far greater success than a government bureau. (Setiono, The Jakarta Post, Oct. 31, 1998).

* in a multilingual society like Indonesia, community-based planning plays an important role in minimizing language conflicts and linguistic inequity which have become explosive issues.

* the presence of community representatives in language planning and decision-making can reduce barriers between linguistic minorities and the centralized policy-makers.

* finally, the active involvement of all varieties of language users may promote national unity rather than promote ethnicity.

It is hoped that the above discussion may stimulate critical thinking in solving language problems and eventually encourage Indonesian language planning practitioners to pursue future research. Continuous research on language planning is indeed mandatory for the sake of our language development in the next millennium.

The writer is a teaching staff member at the School of English Education at Atma Jaya Catholic University in Jakarta.