On None contest and English

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 07/11/2007 11:14 AM  |  Opinion

Referring to David Ng's letter in ^The Jakarta Post^ on July 9, I would like to say that the ability to speak English fluently might cause a None Jakarta participant to fail in the preliminary test.

Back in the early 1970s, the daughter of a prominent Education and Culture Ministry official appeared before the audience for a public-speaking test and started blabbing in English with almost native-speaker fluency. The testing committee did not specifically tell her to deliver a speech in English.

She failed, or rather the committee declared that she failed the language test. Why did she speak in a foreign language when Indonesian is the national language, a language most educated Indonesians were still proud of.

Today, Indonesian has degenerated into a kind of language worse than ""Pidgin English"". Except for the absence of ""lah"", an interjection often used in Singlish and in Malay, the typical Indonesian spoken by some Indonesian ""celebrities"" sounds something like this: ""Kita (should be kami) sudah meng-create musical band ini untuk di-performed di depan audience ...,"" thus perplexing most television viewers across the archipelago.

True, English is all-important today, defeating French which was supposed to be the language of diplomacy. But, being one of very few nations that already have their national language following independence from Dutch colonialism, Indonesia today should reinforce the rule that Indonesian is the national language, and that on any signboard the English translation should appear in smaller letters below the Indonesian names.

There is no need to ""Anglicize"" words which have been in existence in the Indonesian vocabulary since 1928 and even earlier.

Indonesians should be proud of their national language which in many respects is more expressive, more colorful and more versatile than foreign ones.

TATU F. MAULANI
Jakarta

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