Preparing bahasa Indonesia for the new millennium

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.