Ruminations on a Distant Homeland Michel's thoughts on Indonesia

Indonesians adopting English: but in what way?Posted on July 28, 2010 by Michel S.

As recently posted in the New York Times:

Indonesia’s linguistic legacy is increasingly under threat as growing numbers of wealthy and upper-middle-class families shun public schools where Indonesian remains the main language but English is often taught poorly. They are turning, instead, to private schools that focus on English and devote little time, if any, to Indonesian.
As English Spreads, Indonesians Fear for Their Language, by Norimitsu Onishi

I guess it is a bit ironic that, on a post about Indonesians’ new fetish for the English language, I am writing this in English myself. While, in this case, it’s because this article gets syndicated in an English-speaking blog, it also happens to be true that I am more fluent in English than Indonesian. Though for a different reason than stated in the linked article…

Live in Indonesia for long enough, and you’d likely have experienced the situation described in the article. By its omissions, however, it might portray the wrong picture to those unfamiliar with Indonesian history.

The country has been independent for slightly less than 65 years — if you live in a developed country and was born when we declared independence, you’d only have reached retirement age! As the article described, Indonesia was adopted as the national language — it did not say when, but this was in 1928; again, within the lifetime of long-lived octogenarians.

Most Indonesians come from families that, within one or two generations, do not speak Indonesian as their mother tongue (p.s. NYT, it’s “Bahasa Indonesia” or “Indonesian”, never “Bahasa” — don’t perpetuate this error made mostly by English speakers). Unless you speak Malay at home (about 8% of the population), your mother tongue would be as different from Indonesian as, say, Dutch is to German. And that’s the best-case scenario. If you (or your parents) come from a Chinese, Papuan, etc. language then the languages are not even in the same linguistic family.

What I’m getting at is that even “native” Indonesian speakers speak a pidgin form of the language. We spend years getting the proper use of affixes (a delightful feature of the language) drilled into our heads. I challenge you to observe, in spoken conversations, how often this is actually used. Even in written communication: our broadsheets often drop in English words unnecessarily, or use Indonesian words without proper conjugations and declensions.

The article does not, interestingly, explicitly express concern that the new English-speaking generation it describes might end up speaking English as badly as the previous generation speaks (or butchers) Indonesian itself. The upper-middle class that can afford proper international schools might not have this problem, but a child growing up in a family where the parents speak broken English, and the nanny speaks a smattering of English words? Heaven forbid. Given that it’s now fashionable for children to learn Mandarin as well, one could imagine some children growing up speaking three languages equally badly.

A personal anecdote: in the university town of Bloomington, Indiana in the United States, one would from time to time bump into a group of Indonesians — normally in Chinese restaurants. They’re a very close-knit group, speak Indonesians among themselves (despite most of them being of Chinese descent — forced assimilation sometimes does work), and I’d often amuse myself by doing a running translation to English for the benefits of close friends (given the volume of the conversation, one could do this easily while sitting at a nearby table). The grammar is atrocious — and this, sadly, tends to be replicated when they speak English. Indonesian is easy to learn but hard to master — the declension of nouns with affixes is wondrously complex — and since the language lacks tenses, necessitating using adverbial phrases, Indonesians can be infuriatingly vague sometimes on the issue of time.

And after more of a decade in English-speaking countries, one tends to find it much easier to use English whenever one has this need for precision — after all, it’s not a very satisfactory conversation if one speaks really formal Indonesian and gets an unclear, imprecise reply back