infundibulum

While wandering around the Technorati “Language” tag, I ran across a blog called café salemba, which gives us some insight into the politics of language in Indonesia.

I don’t know much about that neck of the woods myself, linguistically, except that Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are very similar languages indeed.

According to an article that Café Salemba points to, there is a movement afoot in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei to promote the use of Malay in the face of increasing use of English, Chinese, and Arabic. (The article seems to have been moved, but also it’s also available here, and there’s a followup article here ).

I think Café Salemba is right to disregard, and even mock, the idea that government can effectively legislate how language is used:

People communicate, regardless of what language they are using. As long as you understand what I mean and I understand what you mean, we’re fine. Misunderstandings might arise, but that’s how language develop in the first place.

That is to say, language is like market. It is supposed to be free. Non-imposed, non-enforced. It grows as people need it. Let people choose how they communicate. There were times when people thought they could impose some new words. And they failed. Umberto Eco told us a story about it. The Italian fascists tried to force people to say “mescita” instead of “bar”. They failed.

It’s just not possible to prevent people from using a particular language. One needn’t look further than the Indonesian Ministry of Education website to detect the influence of borrowings from English: struktur, statistik, kalender, program, publikasi, web mail, profil, nonformal, nasional, e-government, award, workshop…. Heck, the ministry itself is called the Departemen Pendidikan Nasional Republik Indonesia. Call me crazy, but that looks like a four out of five borrowing ratio…

But even so, it’s not quite true to say that governments can have no linguistic influence in the long run — they can and they do. If you compare, for instance, the history of the African countries of Kenya and Tanzania, it’s quite clear that the heavy hand of the Tanzanian government effectively positioned Swahili as the language of the country, whereas in Kenya, English is still widely understood and used.

So there’s at least one key place where imposing a language can play a critical role in shaping the linguistic future of a country: schools.