Promotion of Bahasa Indonesia

Promotion of Bahasa Indonesia

Let me start first with Mr S.K. Srivastava's letter (The
Jakarta Post, June 20, 1995). Had he carefully read my letter of
June 15, 1995, he would have noted that what I said was: Urdu is
the main language of Indian Moslems." Evidently the wording of
the sentence does not logically preclude the possibility of some
Moslems of West Bengal, Kerala or Indian Punjab speaking non-Urdu
languages as Mr Srivastava mentioned so eagerly. Nonetheless the
fact remains that Urdu is the main language of Indian Moslems, as
the Indian demographic statistics of 1991 shows that at least 60
percent of Indian Moslems do speak Urdu. Please, Mr Srivastava,
do not drag in the Moslems of Bangladesh and Pakistan because I
was referring only to Indian Moslems.

However, all this rather involved debate about the linguistic
situation in India is relatively of little importance to the
subject matter of my first letter of June 9, 1995. In the
following paragraphs, therefore, I would like to make further
comments on the background and nature of Bahasa Indonesia itself.

I have noticed amazing opinions occasionally published in the
mass media in the past 20 years or so to the effect that the
adoption of Malay in 1928 as Bahasa Indonesia was supposed to be
the result of a magnanimous or generous act on the part of the
ethnic Javanese who decided not to ask for the adoption of their
own language instead.

I am sure most Indonesians will agree with me that the choice
of Malay was dictated more by suitability and advantages rather
than by any act of magnanimity of any kind. As is well known,
Javanese is a highly stratified and feudalistic sort of language,
whereas Malay is not. This means, I think, that although ethnic
Javanese are certainly free to use those feudalistic words and
forms of address as a mark of extreme deference and politeness
among themselves (if they so insist), in the wider Indonesian
society at large the much more egalitarian Malay or Malay based
Bahasa Indonesia would surely be more appropriate. Besides, I
expect that in a modern and industrialized Indonesia beginning
early next century there will be even less place for such
feudalistic and other undemocratic customs and traditions.

Another factor that made Malay the preferred choice, for which
no magnanimity was needed, was the fact that by 1928 it was
already the lingua franca in the whole of Indonesia (not to
mention Malaysia, Brunei and southern Thailand), while Javanese
was mostly spoken in a much smaller territory, namely Central
Java and parts of East Java. In this connection, I also would
like to remind my fellow citizens of Javanese descent that they
are not really a "majority" group since they constitute only 39-
40 percent of the total population of the country, not 60 or 70
percent some of them sometimes claim. I wrote about the
population of ethnic Javanese at great length in my long letter
to The Jakarta Post (June 16, 1993), based on pre-war and post-
war census results and opinions of experts.

What I am very much opposed to is the adoption or attempted
adoption of English, Sanskrit, Javanese or other words for which
Bahasa Indonesia equivalents are already available. If this
substitution process (or "linguistic enrichment" as some people
would euphemistically describe it) continues much longer, we
could easily end up with our language being so much anglicized,
"Sanskritized" or "Javanized" that no Indonesian with truly
national interests in mind could possibly accept. On the other
hand, I think borrowing from English or the various local
languages such as Batak, Timorese, Javanese, Madurese etc. should
be welcome if the word being borrowed represent ideas or concepts
for which bahasa translations do not yet exist in the strict
sense of the word.

MALI ARMAN

Jakarta