Who cares to mind their national language?

JAKARTA (JP): Seventy-two years have passed since our forebears heard the solemn vow of their leaders to respect Bahasa Indonesia as the national language.

Today it is our turn to hear complaints about the disrespect shown for a language which has served as a unifying factor of the nation.

Still, few care to realize how Bahasa Indonesia is raped and disparaged almost every day.

The confusing usage of our national language by both educated and uneducated people is nothing new. So are the unabated intrusions of foreign words into a language which has become a jungle of acronyms.

An observer of the development of the language said a year ago that the distortions in the use of the language caused communication breakdowns in our society. "The Indonesian words that we speak today have become unclear as they have undergone changes in meaning," said Sarwono Kusumaatmadja.

According to Sarwono, who has served as a minister in several administrations, a prime indication of the problem is that people do not say what they mean.

"The speaker's sentence structure is illogical, his grammar is incorrect and he tends to cover facts," he said.

Sarwono is right; people who talk like this are to be found all across the country. So who is to blame for this linguistic anarchy? Former president Soeharto, perhaps, because he is notorious in his misusage of the language? Maybe. But he is not alone in the offense.

Officially, during his three decades of iron-fisted rule, he seemed thoughtful enough about the national parlance. Repeatedly he called on the nation to speak correct Bahasa Indonesia, although he himself was never successful in the effort to practice what he preached.

And his authoritarian style encouraged many of his underlings to trample the basic rules of the national language without any sense of guilt. For them, Bahasa Indonesia was no longer a means of communication with others but a means of self-identification. The farce was made complete by the mentality of our people who like to cultivate the wrong examples and thumb their noses at the right ones when given the chance.

In the 1980s this writer was shocked the find a friend, who was the boss of the government-sanctioned journalists' association, speaking an unfamiliar Bahasa Indonesia with so many crazy insertions, such as daripada and the suffix kan pronounced as keun, just like Soeharto did.

I was at a loss as to how this man, who I cannot name because he is no longer with us, hilariously changed from the ability to speak well-polished Bahasa Indonesia. I was told that he was actually trying to get the special attention of the big bapak.

The great irony was that Soeharto's language style was so inaccurate that it caused concern among the public. A professor of Bahasa Indonesia once discussed the phenomenon in his TV language forum. Alas, beyond his and others' anticipation, he was subsequently fired for the activity.

On the other side of the social spectrum there are also many people who are influenced by their native tongue when speaking Bahasa Indonesia. Many groups of Indonesians have a tradition to speak colloquially among their families which leaves them forgetting good Indonesian at other times.

Not long ago, another national language expert gave advice in a leading newspaper to people whose ethnic tongue lacks a synonym for introducing cause of bahwa (that) in order that they do not get confused or confuse other people every time they replace it with kalau (which means if).

Their tendency is to say, "I didn't know if she had arrived", instead of ".... that she had arrived".

However, there is a silver lining in watching TV here because we still have some figures who use the language flawlessly. These include economist Emil Salim, former economics minister Kwik Kian Gie and agricultural expert HS Dillon.

But advising local language users is sometimes like a cry in the wilderness. The National Language Development Center once told two private TV stations not to use ...Okay and ... Ngetop behind the official names of their stations because the adjectives are not Indonesians words. But the proposals were flatly rejected for commercial purposes and no tears were shed for the center, or for the Indonesian language.

And now how about the increasing presence of acronyms? In the past the people blamed the military for introducing too many acronyms, but today the police are the guilty party. The reason they give for the exotic creativity is because they are too busy to speak plainly and simply.

So we have to accept curanmor for pencurian kendaraan bermotor (motorcycle theft), senpi (senjata api - firearm), sajam (senjata tajam - sharp weapons), etc, etc? Confused? You should ask any senior superintendent or senior inspectur (a new alien rank) or the newspapers who print them for clarification.

The reality tells us that it is not easy to develop a national language for a nation which lacks a sense of nationalism and discipline. But we should not worry, because those who are blessed to live for another five decades will surely feel at a loss to find yet another inconceivable Bahasa Indonesia.

-- Thayeb Ibnu Sabil