Sociolinguistics in Indonesia

                I’m teaching sociolinguistics this semester, along with American literature. At first I was a little disappointed about teaching sociolinguistics; I had hoped to work more directly with preparing teachers, but those classes were not available. So I took the sociolinguistics class, and it has been one of the most interesting classes I have ever taught.

            It’s not the subject itself that makes it interesting, although no doubt sociolinguistics is interesting. Or I should say, I’ve always found sociolinguistics interesting, but when I’ve taught it to a group of students in Montana, everything has seemed to come off as abstract. Dialects, pidgins, language change, code-switching – in a monolingual community, with dialect differences not immediately apparent, sociolinguistics can sometimes feel like an anthropology class about a place far far away, at least to the students.

            But in my class here, every student speaks at least three languages fluently. Everyone speaks Indonesian and English, and then they speak a variety of the hundreds of local languages spoken in Indonesia – for most of them that is Javanese (Javanese is the native language of about 75 million people). Many students speak two or three of these local languages fluently, and most of them shift between three languages – Javanese at home and with friends, Indonesian at the university, English in their English classes. They gossip in Javanese, and talk about politics in Indonesian; they meet with their teachers in English, and shift to Javanese as soon as the teacher has stepped away. They cram two or more languages into one sentence. Moreover, Javanese has three distinct levels (with more gradations), in which there are separate vocabulary and grammar depending whom you are speaking to. If with equals, there is one form, with strangers of uncertain status, another, with superiors, still another – each one with a different word for, say, eat (as well as I and you) and a different grammar as well. In other words, it is a language that requires a complex understanding of social position at every utterance. (I think in this regard it is not unlike any language, but that understanding is more deeply embedded into the grammar and vocabulary than in most.) Moreover, there are almost 20 distinct dialects of Javanese, most of them in Central Java, where Semarang, Salatiga, and Solo (Salatiga is between Semarang and Solo, which are about 45 miles apart) each have a different dialect of Javanese.

            Which is to say, my students in this classroom are teaching me sociolinguistics this semester in one of the richest teaching experiences I could imagine. Each week student groups put together a presentation about the chapter – though the book rarely uses Indonesian or Javanese as examples, I have encouraged them whenever possible to use those languages, or other local languages, as their examples, and so far I have learned about the colonial and revolutionary history of Indonesian, the politeness levels in Javanese, the dialects of Javanese, the array of languages on the archipelago, the official state policy toward Chinese language (bad) and so forth. It’s been amazing. I hope I can capture some of that energy in the United States, when I teach a similar class the next time.