URI TADMOR (JP/Setiono Sugihsrto)

Amid the paucity of Indonesian linguists who take an ardent interest in conducting research on the country's languages and their local varieties, Uri Tadmor remains as passionate as ever.

His passion about studying the indigenous languages of Indonesia remains as strong as when he did his PhD research on Malay-Indonesian dialect.

The American-born Tadmor first came to Indonesia in 1990, joining the Consortium of Teaching Indonesian (COTI), a program supported by the U.S. government for American students interested in studying Indonesian.

Before moving to Indonesia, Tadmor taught Indonesian language at the University of Hawaii, where he was appointed coordinator of the Indonesian language program from 1994 to 1998.

Fluent in Indonesian, Thai and several other languages, Tadmor is now the coordinator of the Jakarta Field Station of the Max Planck for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Part of the Max Planck Institute's mission is to document indigenous languages around the world, including in Indonesia.

Tadmor said that Max Planck's Jakarta-based language documentation center was initiated by David Gill, another Max Planck linguist, for the purpose of documenting local languages in the form of computerized data-bases, which would eventually be accessible not only to world linguists but also to anyone interested in Indonesian language.

"We continuously document the data we obtain in the field and send them every week to the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig as well as to the University of Delaware in the U.S.," Uri said.

Collaborating with David Gill and other linguists such as Antonia Soriente, Betty Litamahuputty and Tom Conners, Uri and his team have managed to document local languages including some endangered Dayak language varieties in East Kalimantan.

These languages are well-documented in Mencal*ny & Usung Bayung Marang: A Collection of Kenyah Stories in the *ma L*ngh and Lebu 'Kulit Languages, a compilation of 15 folktales, which are written by *ma L*ngh's and Lebu'Kulit native speakers.

Edited by Antonia Soriente, this book depicts stories related to shared local knowledge, cultural traditions, legends, moral tales and recollections of the daily life of Kenyah people.

This book is one of Max Planck Institute's valuable contributions to the preservation of Kenyah language, a language that has never been recorded in the written form before.

As an adherent to descriptive linguistics, Tadmor views that all languages of the world possess their own uniqueness and are worthwhile objects of scientific inquiry. All language varieties in Indonesia including Malay-Indonesia, one of the estimated 1,200 Austronesia languages, are no exception.

"Malay-Indonesian dialect interests me because it is one of the languages with the greatest diversity in the world and is spoken in thousand of localities across Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries. In each region, we can find assorted local varieties such as Malay dialects and Malay-based Creoles whose vocabulary were derived from Malay," Tadmor said.

Tadmor further said that Malay-based creoles are spoken mostly in eastern Indonesia, in places like Ambon, Kupang, Larantuka, Manado and Ternate.

Aside from these regions, Malay dialects are also spoken indigenously in Sumatra, Java and Kalimantan, as well as in other countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Brunei.

As a prolific linguist, Uri has written and published various articles on Malay-Indonesian linguistics. Among them are Grammatical Borrowing in Malay-Indonesia, Kontroversi Asal-Usul Bahasa Melayu Indonesia (The Malay-Indonesian Origin Controversy), and Dialect Endangerment: The Case of Nonthaburi Malay.

Recognized for his erudite works on language varieties in Indonesia, he also serves as the guest editor of NUSA, a periodical monograph on linguistic studies of Indonesian and other languages in Indonesia.

Having socialized with members of various speech communities here, Uri expresses his concern that the number of native speakers of local languages is decreasing.

In many areas, members of the young generations in particular lack of interest in communicating in local languages even with their parents, and no longer show pride in their parents' native language.

"It is a sad story that world language minorities are facing a serious threat of extinction in this century. UNESCO has predicted that of around 7000 local languages spoken in the world at the beginning of the 21st century, 50-90 percent will die before this century comes to an end," Tadmor told The Jakarta Post.

Several reasons have been held responsible for language extinction such as sweeping of globalization, linguicide (intentionally causing the death of a language), language indoctrination and language repression, but according to Tadmor, the speakers' attitude and preference to shift to either national or regional languages has been the key factor contributing to local language endangerment.

With regard to the extinction of indigenous languages of Indonesia, Uri sees this phenomenon as a result of the fact that the central government and local people do not have the initiative to make a serious attempt to preserve the country's linguistic heritage. Indeed, official support for using local languages both in formal and informal domains has been minimal.

With this reality, the number of endangered indigenous languages in this country will surely be on the rise in years to come.

"The situation here is in contrast with that in Asia countries like China where local languages receive strong support from both the central government and local governments and, are still widely used as a medium of instruction in school, in school textbooks, in newspapers, and in radio and television broadcasts," Uri said.

Contrary to its image as a totalitarian and repressive country, China is quite liberal country in terms of the preservation of minority cultural and language heritage, although not without exception.

Compare the situation in China with that in Indonesia, says this multilingual linguist, where the use of the Indonesian language is overwhelming and dominates practically television programs, newspapers, and magazines.

"Rarely do we see televisions stations here airing programs using local languages," he said.

Tadmor also lamented that all literatures here are published in the national language -- Indonesian, and very little is published in local languages, even languages with millions of speakers such as Javanese and Sundanese.

Acknowledging that some schools here de offer local languages, Tadmor is of the opinion that their instruction may be counter productive, as they are taught as additional school subjects (which the students usually loathe) rather than being used as the medium of instruction.

Asked what role linguists have to play in preserving Indonesian local languages, Tadmor said "we as foreign researchers cannot do much except documenting and analyzing the languages, and facilitating preservation by providing local people with the instruments they need if they want to maintain their own native languages".

He adheres to a commonly-held maxim in the realm of any scientific inquiry that intervention of researches by foisting dos and don'ts on the research population is deemed unscientific and unethical.

However, it just may be that his efforts and efforts of other linguists will make a contribution to the preservation of Indonesia's rich linguistic heritage.

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