RI language planning revisited

[Harold F. Schiffman]

from the Jakarta Post April 24, 2006

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.

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