Speaking in tongues: That ain't no way to treat a language

I was at a coffee shop with a couple of friends, catching up on gossip before we had to return to our dreary offices, when a young woman at the next table turned to us and asked in American- accented English whether she could have a light.

She was Indonesian -- as are we -- which was apparent not just from her physical appearance but from the conversation she was having with her companions.

She could not know that I had spent more than half my growing up years in the United States, nor that my two friends -- one of whom had lived abroad for over a decade -- work as journalists in London.

She could not have known we were fluent in English because we were speaking in Indonesian and showed no trace of the "cosmopolitanism" that so many Indonesians seem eager to flaunt.

"Maybe I look like a bule (Westerner)," my friend said, pointing to her fair skin.

"Or maybe she just wants us to think she is above speaking in Indonesian," I quipped.

It has become my latest pet peeve to complain about the current generation of "bilingual" Indonesians, who throw their mother tongue out of the window to acquire English -- or should I say, bits of it -- as a display of social status.

And nothing is more indicative of this than the whole pop culture scene.

On radio stations that offer Top 40 music and irreverent talk shows, DJs assume that if they sprinkle enough English words in their verbal routines -- no matter how lame it sounds and despite the grammatical flaws -- it makes them "special".

Sometimes, they even use inappropriate or offensive English words without even realizing it, as in the case of one DJ who referred to blacks by the most derogatory epithet that exists while telling a story on air.

I put the blunder down to ignorance, not racism. In her eternal quest to be oh-so cool, the DJ must have summoned up every word she could remember from a Quentin Tarantino movie to convey her ideas (which I suspect were thin on substance anyway).

While I accept the fact that MTV speak is the lingua franca of 25 year olds and younger with access to cable TV across the globe, I also fear that it contributes greatly to this erosion of appreciation in our own language.

Just like DJs, VJs feel obligated to mix English and Indonesian liberally, no matter how pointless and irrelevant it is, just to show that they belong to the circle of "special people".

One presenter of a music program on a local TV station destroyed what could have been an interesting interview with singer John Mayer recently, irritating his fans like myself, who happened to be watching the show.

She primped and preened in front of the camera, and instead of focusing on the interview to come up with some interesting questions, she was too busy affecting the right accent, yielding either pretentious or simply lame inquiries.

Then there are magazines that pepper their articles with English phrases or words -- although sometimes misspelled or inappropriately used -- to appeal to that niche of hip yuppies or trendy teenagers.

Hey, it's high school again: Make sure you do what the in- crowd does and you're socially accepted.

Except it's not high school any more.

There are young children taking small steps into the world, impressionable teenagers and clueless grown-ups, all of whom may start to think this is the correct way to treat a language.

Call me a linguistic purist or an alarmist at worst, but I believe the danger lies in the irony that, behind the surface of "bilingualism", some of these people cannot even form a complete sentence in correct Bahasa Indonesia, let alone in English.

We are a nation of half-and-half linguists with a sophomoric ability in our own language, but with a fabulous stock vocabulary of American slang and convincing pronunciation, thanks to the miracle of TV and Hollywood movies.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like something that we should be proud of.

-- Sarasvati