TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Soenjono's legacy in linguistics and education
Prof
Change Size
P
rof. Soenjono Dardjowidjojo, one of the national linguistic icons and language teaching specialists, passed away on Sept. 22, this year, at the age 71.
Born in Kajen, a small village near the central Javanese town of Pekalongan in 1938, Soenjono dedicated his life to national education and the advancement of linguistics.
He began his career as a lecturer in Indonesian language studies at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand in 1968.
In 1978 he moved to Hawaii, where he lectured on the Indonesian language.
His great accomplishments resulted in his being appointed chairman on the Department of Indo-Pacific Languages at the University of Hawaii where he was also awarded a full professorship in Indonesian language and linguistics.
Soenjono's 12 year sojourn in the United States made him less known at home among young linguists and young educational specialists and practitioners in Indonesia.
Not many people today know that Soenjono was the brain behind the application of the SKS (the credit system) now being adopted in universities nationwide.
Few also know that he was the co-author of Tata Bahasa Baku Bahasa Indonesia (The Standard Grammar of the Indonesian Language) published in 1988 and then revised in 1993 under the auspices of the Education Ministry.
Though getting involved in the co-authorship of the book, which is highly prescriptive in nature, Soenjono never insisted that language users should blindly follow what is prescribed in the book.
"My tasks, were to prescribe the rules of how the language ought to be used, but language users still had the freedom to choose what they intended to say".
Obviously, Soenjono was fully aware that linguists were powerless in their attempts to prescribe language usage and style unless they took into account socio-linguistic variables.
He was not sympathetic when the Language Center, evoking the spirit on nationalism, started promoting the use of the national language by trying to ban Western terminology and expressions that had become ubiquitous in all domains of life.
His contention was that Western terminology should be proscribed because examples of it could be used as useful synonyms to counterpart Indonesian expressions. In this way, he said, we could enrich the lexicon of our language.
During his career as a linguist, Soenjono enjoyed world recognition as one the senior scientists in the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
He was also active in professional organizations such as the Conference on Astronesian Languages and the Comite International Permanent de Linguistes.
Among the world's linguists, Soenjono was better known as the author of Sentence Patterns in Indonesian (1978, 1993) and Vocabulary Building in Indonesian (1982) - two influential erudite works that have become standard textbooks used for teaching Indonesian in many universities in the US.
As part of his concern over the improvement of national education, Soenjono, a staunch critic of the professorship system in the country, once proposed that the granting of professorships should be based not merely on the quantity of work and research done, which one accumulates from Tri Dharma (teaching, research, and community service), but instead on the quality of these inputs.
For the sake of the quality of education, Soenjono demanded tougher requirements (i.e. the number of references indexed and the impact of scholarly works on educational science) and that these be imposed on scholars who were to be promoted as professor.
However he noted an absence of rigorous qualitative requirements for the Indonesian professorship system. Because professorships could be obtained relatively simply by collecting points, Soenjono once jokingly dubbed the product of the Indonesian professorship system as "professor kiloan" -one who is promoted to being a professor by accumulating points from teaching, research, and community service.
Soenjono's contributions to the fields of linguistics and education in the country have left an indelible mark on the profession.
Soenjono may have passed away and no longer dominates the linguistic and educational landscapes, but his legacy neither "dies" nor fades away.
The writer is chief editor of the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching. He is Soenjono's former student and is currently pursuing his doctorate degree in Applied Linguistics at Atma Jaya Catholic University.
