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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 849

Part of Session 130: Language in Multilingual Cities (Other abstracts in this session)

Language Ecologies, Policies and Shift in a Globalizing Indonesia

Authors: Zentz, Lauren Renée
Submitted by: Zentz, Lauren Renée (University of Arizona, United States of America)

In this ethnographic description of local language policies and ideologies in an urban university context in Central Java, Indonesia, I explore shifting access to Javanese, Indonesian, and English linguistic resources. I will demonstrate that modernist ideologies have constructed Javanese as sometimes a language and other times a non-language form of communication; English as sometimes a symbol of prestige and mobility, other times a highly commodified good that the most privileged might access; and Indonesian as increasingly a language of local identity expression and modernity.

The most recent Indonesian national language policy encourages citizens to “love” their local languages, “use” their national language, Indonesian, and “study” foreign languages.  This policy and its precedents have led to the creation of languages and of contexts delimiting the spaces in which languages may be used inside national confines.  Indonesia’s nationalization and modernization over primarily this last century (Keane 2003, Smith-Hefner 2009, Cole 2010), the state’s “creation” of bahasa Indonesia (Heryanto 2006, Foulcher 2007), and contemporary and multiple global flows of finance, media, and technology (Appadurai 1996, 2001), all set the scene for this analysis of language- and nation-hood in Indonesia in its 65^th year of official existence.

To analyze shifting language ecologies in one urban context in Central Java, Indonesia I will expand Blommaert’s (2005, 2010) use of ‘access’ to refer not only to mostly state-driven institutions that gatekeep linguistic resources, but also to address any linguistic resources, institutional or otherwise (ie community and family settings), and all influenced by state political ideologies.  Through this lens I explore how state modernization has necessitated the institutionalization of local, national, and global languages but by doing so it has 1) iconized local languages: Javanese now represents the past and rurality; 2) commodified English: expensive and higher educations are accompanied by better English fluency; and 3) led to language shift away from Javanese, toward an Indonesian that increasingly marks local identity, and toward a commodified English that marks prestige and mobility.