Added to this were the complicated grammar and levels of speech in the Sundanese language -- aspects that apparently led students down the track of linguistic studies.

Learning the Sundanese language was once quite a frightening exercise for both schoolchildren and their parents. Even Hawe Setiawan, who is a secretary of the Sunda Study Center-Bandung and thus concerned daily with this indigenous West Java language, found it hard to help his second-grade child with Sundanese homework.

The difficulty in following Sundanese lessons and students' fear of mispronunciation finally made both students and parents reluctant to have anything to do with the language itself. Instead, they tended to communicate in Bahasa Indonesia, which is more democratic and egalitarian.

For example, some words such as those meaning "to eat" or "to have a meal" change according to the age and social status of the speaker with respect to the listener.

If an individual wishes to offer something to eat to their peers or to those younger than they, the word dahar is used, but tuang is used in addressing their elders and neda for their parents.

Sundanese is known for having a vast vocabulary. This is evident in the Sundanese dictionary by Raden Alla Danadibrata, which was sponsored by Bandung's Padjadjaran University sponsored and launched in 2007: The dictionary contains 40,000 entries. Even ethnic Sundanese thus began to shy away from further studies of their mother tongue.

Like many other indigenous languages and dialects, Sundanese is also threatened by extinction, mainly through disuse. In 1904, Sundanese was predicted to die out by 2000 due to globalization, as was the case with various indigenous languages around the world.

Sundanese academicians and community figures strived to refute the forecast by making earnest endeavors to preserve their mother tongue. The prediction did not come true, as Sundanese speakers in West Java and Banten today still number 21 million. But the question was how to boost Sundanese speech among the shrinking number of speakers of the younger generation.

A new approach

The long-term pressures exerted by passionate exponents of culture, as well as academicians and politicians in Sunda lands finally compelled West Java Governor Danny Setiawan to issue Regional Regulation No. 5/2003, which affirmed the preservation of the indigenous language as well as Sundanese literature and writing.

The Sundanese language curriculum was introduced officially in 2006, and the following year, Sundanese became a mandatory subject for primary, junior high and senior high school students.

"The particulars of Sundanese theory and grammar, which used to make children shun the language, are now no longer (part of the curriculum). The new curriculum focuses more on the psychomotor side of the regional tongue as a medium of expression," said Ahmad Hadi, a Sundanese language teacher at a state junior high school in Lembang, north of Bandung.

Unlike his colleagues, Hadi has applied a method of two-way communication in his language classes to make Sundanese easier for students to understand. Hadi has been using this method since 1995, long before the launch of the new curriculum that emphasizes Sundanese language usage and literary appreciation.

In his Sundanese classes, Hadi takes his students out to the schoolyard to recite poems, perform dramas or read novels and short stories in Sundanese. He then asks his students to summarize the plot or theme of the literary works or to retell the pieces in their own Sundanese versions. According to Hadi, the new curriculum allows much more room for Sundanese language teachers to improvise in stimulating their students' interest.

Hadi, for instance, develops his classes creatively by featuring children's hero Sun Go Kong (the monkey king in the Chinese legend, Journey to the West) in local folklore Lutung Kasarung, about a prince disguised as a monkey. He also has taught the language by adapting the legend of the creation of Lembang's Mount Tangkubanperahu, or by rewriting classical Sundanese songs like Pupuh, Kinanti and Asmarandana into contemporary versions.

For example, he made a Pupuh verse more digestible to his students by rewriting "a flying child" as "a flying Superman, an American". Hadi stimulates his students' interest in the classical pieces by playing them on a guitar or to the tunes of popular bands like Peter Pan and Letto. Through such strategies, he has modified Sundanese songs into forms more attractive to today's youths.

Struggles ahead

Hawe Setiawan believes that teachers are important actors who enliven the new curriculum and make it more applicable to students.

"This curriculum and senior high school Sundanese language classes open a wider opportunity for the local tongue to become a means of communication among members of the younger generation. It's now only a matter of how to make it more appealing," he said.

Sadly, however, support from regional communities -- as the central pillar for promoting and preserving Sundanese -- has not yet matched the intense revitalization of Sundanese language teaching in schools. Hawe thus fears that the household use of Sundanese would be abandoned, which poses a serious threat to the language's continuing existence.

During the commemoration of International Mother Tongue Day in February 2007, Gugun Gunadi, a linguist at Padjadjaran University's School of Letters, announced the results of the latest language survey: The survey found that Sundanese was only spoken by 30 percent of Bandung's three million people.

Further, as these speakers were limited to students learning Sundanese in school, Gugun predicted that by 2010, no Bandung citizens would be speaking the language.

To combat this, Hawe suggested that the Sundanese community should alter its campaign to promote Sundanese by eliminating the specter of extinction that haunts this local tongue.

"The statement (of looming extinction) has a great psychological effect, because no one will be encouraged to study something that already has been declared near-extinct," he said.

"We should venture to set a trend of speaking Sundanese among the public to make it survive in synergy with formal teaching."

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