The Republic of Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 17,500 islands located between Southeast Asia and Australia. The official national language, Indonesian, based on a form of Malay, is universally taught in schools, and consequently is spoken by nearly every Indonesian. It is the language of business, politics, national media, education, and academia. In a nation which boasts more than 700 different languages and dialects – 14 of them with over a million speakers each – and a vast array of ethnic groups, it plays an important unifying role for the country. The Indonesian language is the only thing which gives substance to the idea that there is a national Indonesian culture.
by Sarah Baiz
Indonesian: The Unifying National Language
Known locally as Bahasa Indonesia (literally “the Language of Indonesia”), it is the native language of only 12% of the Indonesian population. Portrayed as a language, that in some sense, belongs to no one in particular, it is seen to be readily learnable and translatable. As a modernist project to unify the country into one culture, the introduction of Indonesian sought to find that which is most translatable, most open to being understood by other languages. In fact, the vast majority of its speakers learned Indonesian as a second language.
Prior to 1945, there was no unifying national language in Indonesia, when the government decided to modernize and then utilize a dialect of Malay. The implementation of Indonesian as a national language has been a central part of a self-consciously “modern” project of national self-creation. The choice of Malay for the basis of the national language was not obvious. It was the native language of a small minority, in contrast to numerically dominant groups such as the Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese (the three largest language groups in Indonesia). When compared to other countries where a national language has been imposed by the government to unify the country, Indonesian has been a remarkable success. This is due in part to the absence of any of the ethnic or political resistance encountered by many postcolonial national languages, being identified directly with neither the colonizer nor any single privileged ethnic group, as was the case of Hindi in India.
Today, Indonesians are overwhelmingly bilingual. In infancy, they learn the native language of their island region and, when they enter school, they learn Bahasa Indonesia – the national language and medium of instruction in educational institutions at all levels throughout the country. It is rare to meet an Indonesian who is not fluent in her or his native tongue as well as the national language.
Sources:
Keane, Webb. 2003. “Second Language, National Language, and Post-Colonial Voice: On Indonesian”. In Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology. P. G. Rubel and A. Rosman, eds. pp. 153-175. Oxford: Berg
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