Talk about irony, this post is in English talking about an article about the increasing lack of grasp of the Indonesian language by today’s Indonesians. The piece is in Indonesian which was posted in October last year. In essence, the writer lamented the lack of using proper Indonesian in not only daily conversations among its people but in formal occasions as well such as presidential speeches and parliamentary hearings.

While the intent is noble and admirable, I’d like to knock some sense a little. The Indonesian language as we know it did not come to be until sometime in the late 1970’s, that’s no more than 40 years ago. The country’s second president who ruled for 32 years failed to use Indonesian properly in all of his speeches, stumbling over certain pronunciations and misusing certain words constantly (notable one being the use of “daripada” instead of “dari” when denoting the origin of a subject). The third and current presidents slip a lot of English words into their speeches.

As someone who’s not even sure whether he’s part of Gen-X or Gen-Y (no thanks to dubious categorization) and grew up with multiple languages in constant use at home, this almost sounds like a propaganda push to adopt what is in fact an artificially made language. It doesn’t seem to be but it sounds that way. 

Many of my generation’s parents and grandparents commonly used a combination of languages including English, Javanese, Japanese, and Dutch. Specifically Dutch when it comes to grandparents thanks to the extended period of Dutch invasion of the archipelago. 

When people ask what my mother tongue is, it’s rather difficult to say, just like when people ask me about my ethnicity (Mix of Chinese, Arabic, Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Indian – I feel for my daughter whose ethnicity is even more mixed up. Add European into that mix)

In addition, a great number of Indonesian words are actually loan words from Arabic, Portuguese, and Dutch. Very few were from English but you don’t need to be a linguist to know that. The thing is, with the ever increasing English influence into today’s use of Indonesian, there seems to be a concerted effort to reject the assimilation or adoption of most English words, something that would have been the opposite had the English been a major influence in the nation’s past. 

Many of today’s youth grew up with a significant influence of English from multiple sources, specifically anything related to technology. Many of us went overseas for our education and it just so happens the popular destination countries are United States, United Kingdom, Singapore and Australia. Guess what they have in common?

Okay so the founding fathers of this nation got together and declared Indonesian as the uniting language for what was then going to be a new nation. But what makes up Indonesian which was derived primarily from the Sumatran language of Malay? As I mentioned above, it contains innumerable mix of words from foreign as well as local languages.

Not to mention the significant disparity between the standard or written form and the conversational form of Indonesian. Unlike English where the forms are mostly similar, at least before you go into English in specific professions or industries.

Anyway, the language was chosen to unite the people back in the late 1920’s. 80 years later, the nation is already united, the people are… well, mostly united when called for anyway. The language? it’s something that evolves and adapts. How the youth uses Indonesian seems to be at odds with how the “powers that be” over at Pusat Bahasa think the language should be used. Factoring in the rapid adoption of English-oriented terms of the technology world, this battle won’t be over any time soon.