RI language planning revisited

[Francis M. Hult]

The Jakarta Post

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid=20060422.F02&irec=2

RI language planning revisited

Setiono Sugiharto, Jakarta

The Malay language conference recently held in Brunei Darussalam produced a 
consensus on the preservation of Malay and its local language variants. Both 
Dendy Sugondo and Firdaus Abdullah, the Indonesian and Malaysian delegation 
leaders, called for the use of foreign terminology to be discouraged, so as to 
protect Bahasa Malay.

This consensus was politically rather than academically motivated. For one 
thing, it was reached by a group of elites, not by professional representative 
members of society such as journalists, teachers -- especially language 
teachers, media commentators, entertainers, and the like. 

In fact, it is these professionals who disseminate the language more 
successfully than any government agency. 

For another, the consensus was reached without accounting for the historical 
perspective of the Malay language, which has long been infiltrated by a vast 
number of foreign languages, such as Sanskrit, Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese, 
Chinese, and English. 

This obviously indicates the impurity of Malay, which is linguistically very 
receptive toward foreign languages. Thus, banning foreign terms from entering 
local languages is certainly counter productive. 

More recently, a proposed draft bill on the protection of the Indonesian 
language and its local variants, initiated by Dendy Sugondo, currently the 
head of the Language Center at the National Education Ministry, reflects an 
attempt to repeat the past failure of the National Center of Language 
Development. 

During the New Order era, it was Anton Moelione, then head of Language Center, 
who was trusted by the Education Ministry to initiate the project, altering 
foreign terms in billboards, the names of shopping center, buildings, and 
companies to the Indonesian equivalent. Though the project spent a lot of 
money, in the end it achieved nothing. 

As one can easily see in the business domain, foreign terminologies keep 
flourishing, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to find their precise or 
close Indonesian equivalents. 

The center's past failure strongly presupposes the failure in Indonesia 
language planning, which has been notoriously loaded politically rather than 
academically. It has been evident that the Language Center never embraced 
language users at large when making policy. 

Nor did it accommodate their thoughts and ideas in formulating policy. It is 
true that the outcomes of language development were disseminated via various 
means such as electronic media, language services using telephone, e-mail, and 
the publication of language manuals, yet they were the end-products of 
language and political elites, which might not have matched the attitudes or 
preferential views of language users. 

Consequently, though well-informed about the center's product, few language 
users, if any, would use it in communication. This could be one of the reasons 
why the center never achieved any success in language planning. Furthermore, 
the Language Center never conducted any systematic evaluation regarding the 
effectiveness, constraints and language users' preferential views of language 
dissemination. 

Arguably, an experienced language planner should take into account the 
constraints, tendencies, and rationales the existing social, cultural, 
political, and economic parameters offer. As the late Alisjahbana once 
remarked "the real language planning is only feasible where the planners and 
later the executors of the plan have been successful in manipulating the 
behavior of people whom they address in their planning." 

This argument, however, runs counter to both past and contemporary language 
planning which does not seem to be sufficiently sensitized to the complexity 
of the social rationale of language planning in practice. 

Worst of all, the center was never transparent in giving its accountability to 
its constituents. This certainly adds to another reason for the center's 
failure in language dissemination. 

Given the above accounts, the idea of protecting Malay and its local languages 
by "sterilizing" the influence of foreign terminologies will be futile effort 
unless serious and thorough planning embracing linguistics, sociolinguistics, 
anthropological linguistics, and historical linguistics is undertaken. The 
implications are at least two fold. 

First, language planning should not be determined on an ad hoc basis, as was 
and currently is. Planning, as a continuous process, presupposes the existence 
of a systematic and explicit procedure that needs to be followed. 

Second, any approach to language planning should remain academic rather than 
political, and thus, pundits in the related fields mentioned above should be 
included. 

Successful planning certainly requires a great deal of preparation. Thus, 
rather than being bothered with the draft bill on language, the center should 
ponder the creation of a system that can assist language planers in 
establishing and facilitating patterns of communication that would enable its 
language to function more effectively and equitably in meeting the needs and 
interests of language users. 

The writer is a lecturer at the English Department Atma Jaya Catholic 
University, Jakarta. He can be reached at setiono.sugiharto at atmajaya.ac.id.