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