Continuity and Change in Indonesian Language Development

The development of Indonesian as a new national language is closely linked to the development of Indonesia as a new nation, but the Indonesian language has only rarely been studied as a part of larger patterns of social and cultural change. An overview of the language situation in Jakarta, Indonesia's center and capital, highlights linguistic continuities and discontinuities between that modern speech community and the traditional culture of the dominant Indonesian ethnic group, the Javanese. The speech repertoires of Jakartans do not resemble the well-known Javanese speech levels, as Benedict Anderson has suggested, but they are better described with the widely known sociolinguistic concept of diglossia. This relatively abstract characterization can be complemented by a study of patterns of borrowing into Indonesian from foreign languages, which may reflect long-standing indigenous attitudes toward power and the use of foreign linguistic codes. Different aspects of the rapidly changing linguistic situation in Jakarta may reflect on the emerging national language and culture.