Taking Stock | by Jennifer Lindsay

OCTOBER was language month in Indonesia. The month of October celebrates the Indonesian language because it was on October 28, 1928 that the Malay language, bahasa Melayu, was renamed bahasa Indonesia, the Indonesian language. That is now 90 years ago. Every year, Indonesian writers, scholars and officials take the pulse of the national language and reflect on its heritage, its present, and its future direction. So it is timeforus, too, to take stock of some of what this column has covered over the past six years.

One recurring theme has been the ongoing process of divergence and convergence between the languages of Indonesia and Malaysia from their common Malay beginning. In many ways, this used to be clearer to see and hear, because usually what was being compared was formal language. Before the explosion of audio-visual media in Indonesia in the 1990s and more recently the revolution of the Internet and social media, the Indonesian language was relatively close in its written and spoken manifestations. The national language project since Indonesia’s independence had smoothed out earlier variants of the colonial era—including Sino Malay and the so-called ‘bazaar’ Malay. It elevated spoken language to a more systematized and standardized written form and then fed that back again as speech through the education system, the radio, and later, television.

Malaysians are more used to hearing variants of Malay, and placing their ‘bahasa Malaysia’ as a zone of formal language, like BBC English. They speak about ‘Kedah Malay’ and ‘Johor accent’. While Indonesians, too, are certainly aware of regional accent (Javanese accent, for instance), it always seemed to me that Malaysians were used to hearing wide differences in styles of Malay including pronunciation and accent, and because of this they were more open to hearing (and reading) Indonesian and embracing it as Malay than ever happened the other way around. Indonesians liked to maintain the national border of linguistic difference. ‘Malay’ was another country.

But now there are so many kinds of ‘bahasa Indonesia’. Indonesian today has more variety in speech—with generational, group and regional inflection—than it has had probably since the days it was baptized as ‘bahasa Indonesia’. It is being constantly enriched with regional-inflected vocabulary and intonation, and with slang. The zone of formal Indonesian has narrowed. Today, broad differences in accent between Malaysian Malay and Indonesian Malay are not such an issue, because there are so many accents and variants around.

In early November I had the chance to attend one evening of the Indonesia Dramatic Reading Festival in Yogyakarta, an independent event organized by artists linked to the Garasi Performance Institute. One play text read at the festival, Tiga Lapis Kesedihan (Three Layers of Sadness) by Shohifur Ridho’i I found particularly striking. Ridho’i, born in 1990, is of Madurese origin but has lived in Yogyakarta since 2010. He is thus thoroughly a child of the post 1998 Reformasi era, media and social media. His play text consisted of a brilliant collage of text snippets from social media, which were read out—spoken that is—by a group of actors sitting in a line. The text moved rapid-fire up and down the line, full of slang, ranting, cliché and abuse. All the short expressive insert words of speech were liberally employed. The language was as informal as you can get, totally oral, and yet its origin was text. Social media, with its slight distancing (it is not actually face to face) and its possibility of anonymity allows for vivid vulgar talk, and viciousness. It has been, and continues to be, a huge impetus to the booming of Indonesian as a national language of colloquialism, slang and informality. Ridho’i’s dramatic text—at times hilarious, at times terrifying—was brilliant evidence of the contemporary collapsing of borders between speech and writ ing in that process.

One of the people in the audience was the Singaporean playwright Alfian Sa’at who was visiting Yogyakarta. Before we watched the performance, I asked him how he was finding Indonesian. He said it about 85 percent the same as the Malay he speaks. (I find that a pretty high percentage, actually, when one thinks of an American, for instance, coping with Scottish English). After the performance I asked him about that particular play, and he said that with all the slang the level of comprehensibility was down to about 70 percent. The slang and colloquialisms differ, both of speech and social media chat. The differences are moving fast, and much more study could be done of this current area of divergence.

While I often stress the basic similarity of Indonesian Malay and Malaysian Malay—perhaps indeed because I come from an outpost English language background and so to me the phenomenon of differences across a shared language is normal and fun, lately I have had to confront the fact that there are some areas of difference where it really matters; mathematics, for instance, and probably also the exact sciences in general (which I have not yet had time to examine in detail). For all its differences and variety, English is pretty standardized in its vocabulary for such things. Not so the Malay of Indonesia and Malaysia, where national education systems have introduced quite different vocabulary in scientific terminology, and the differences are often confusing. I can only think that this is a case of deliberate fashioning of difference.

In the 1950s, the early years of the independent Indonesian republic, there was great faith in the potential future of Malay—Indonesian Malay and Malayan Malay—as a modern global language. The linguist Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana and his team worked hard to fashion a dictionary of foreign terms translated into Indonesian, the Kamus Istilah. It was an incredible piece of work. There were 521 words coined for algebra alone. Many of these terms were intended to bring Malaya and Indonesia closer linguistically, even though the naming of their languages stubbornly emphasized their independence of each other. This is part of the fascinating linguistic to and fro between the neighbors.

In 1972, the two countries agreed to a common spelling system, which was a strong symbolic statement of sameness after the belligerent Konfrontasi between Indonesia and Malaysia of the late Sukarno era. Today, though, in the official zone at least, terminology is hastening the drift apart. At the airport in Singapore, for instance, there is a desk at arrivals with immigration cards that people entering Singapore must complete. The forms themselves are in English, but at the desk there are translations to help people complete the forms. These include one for ‘Bahasa Melayu’ and another for ‘Bahasa Indonesia’. And yes, they are different. This was definitely not the case 20 years ago, perhaps less. There was one shared form.

These days, there is no further discussion at any official level about standardization, as far as I know. So where will things go? Malay has always been a slippery language, resisting control. It has always had quite delineated informal and formal variants, and a sliding of barriers between informal and formal. There will probably always be pockets where some Malay of Indonesia and some Malay of Malaysia will cross. In a decade’s time, at the centenary of the Indonesian nationalists’ adoption of Malay as the language of Indonesian unity, it will be fascinating to see where things stand.

Note: This article was first published in Tempo magazine (English version) on December 17, 2018


Jennifer Lindsay, the translator, studied in New Zealand, the United States and Australia. She first went to Indonesia in 1971 and has lived there at various times since in various guises, including student, researcher, diplomat, and foundation program officer. She has translated many literary and academic works from Indonesian into English, and is a regular translator and columnist for Indonesia’s weekly magazine, Tempo. Jennifer is a Research Affiliate in the School of Culture, History and Language at The Australian National University, and her academic writing focuses on Indonesian culture, language and history. She was contributing editor of Between Tongues: Translation and/of/in Performance in Asia published by Singapore University Press (2006) and Heirs to World Culture: Being Indonesian 1950-1965 (KITLV 2010). She also directed a documentary about Indonesia’s cultural missions abroad, (Presenting Indonesia: Cultural Missions Abroad 1952-1965). Jennifer now divides her time between Indonesia and Australia.

Shohifur Ridho'i

Lahir pada tahun 1990 di Sumenep. Menulis naskah drama, puisi, dan esai seni pertunjukan. Tahun 2016 mendirikan rokateater, kolektif seni yang berbasis di Yogyakarta. Profil yang lebih lengkap, silakan kunjungi laman ini.

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