Lost for Words

As we traveled down a busy street in Jakarta, a Bugis taxi driver introduced himself to me with great enthusiasm, visibly excited to encounter someone from his ethnic group. A few moments later, he found himself very disappointed.

Unlike him, I can no longer speak the local language in which his words flowed most freely. It seemed he hoped to make a cultural connection, and found that he had failed. Perhaps he wanted to share a joke with me. But how could we laugh together and trade jokes when we couldn’t even understand each other?  Like so many things, jokes in local languages are untranslatable.
 
I grew up in an oil town, Balikpapan, in East Kalimantan. It’s a new city, founded by the Dutch when oil was discovered in the area. A place without a true “native” people who have put down roots and developed a local culture. As a child, I played with Rini and Wati, from a Javanese family, who only spoke Indonesian. In elementary school, even Abas, one of the only students from a coastal Bugis family, spoke to me only in Indonesian.
 
I can see that speaking Indonesian gave kids like us advantages. We had no barriers keeping us from talking to and befriending kids from the hundreds of different ethnic groups pulled to the town by the lure of oil and jobs. Nothing hindered us in the market, in schools or in the workplace
 
When I arrived in Jakarta, I found the same phenomena. Many young people no longer knew any local languages. Or, at best, knew just enough words to ask simple questions.  “Where are you going?” “Have you eaten?”

In my family, only my mother and father can speak their local languages. Born and raised in two different ethnic groups, they can speak their own native languages and each other’s. My father comes from South Minahasa, better known as the Minahasa-Manado area. My mother’s family is Bugis-Makassar. She comes from Luwu, an area believed to be the origin of the Bugis tribes.

Recently, I tried asking my mother why she didn’t teach her native language to my sisters and I. The local language is more difficult than Indonesian, she told me. And remember, she said, we lived outside of that language community. How would you have practiced?

But I could see from my parents’ lives that local languages created social ties between people of the same culture. Their languages were intimately tied to distinct customs, culture, knowledge, arts and literature. Through these languages and customs, they had a direct link to generation upon generation of collective knowledge that had been preserved in them.

These languages are the keys to customs and ways of communicating that have helped these cultures survive for thousands of years. They know the names of every leaf and tree, and how mankind can use them. They are connected to their environment because they know these names and functions through the local languages, which have developed in the area over millennia.

Without the ability to speak these local languages, it is hard to build these social and cultural ties. I’ve found myself disconnected, without access to these rich cultures. I can neither speak nor write the languages, and I cannot understand Bugis literature in its original language. I’ve been placed at a distance from works like the La Galigo, a Bugis epic longer than the Mahabharata or Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.  So too the various forms of poetry and rhyme in the Bugis culture.

My father comes from a long line of shamans. There was a time when every member of our family became a local medicine man or woman. Now, I have lost this knowledge, because this wisdom was passed down from one generation to the next through writings and oral history in the Tombatu language

The loss of regional languages was accelerated by assimilationist policies, in which the New Order regime tried to homogenize Indonesian society, down to promoting a diet of rice all the way to the eastern ends of the country. The spirit of autonomy and diversity only began to be appreciated after the reform era. Only now do we see a renewed emphasis on the importance of local content, including local languages, in school curricula.

In some places, in newly built areas, mining areas, or areas where many have migrated, and in places where people of many ethnicities gather and trade, and in Indonesia’s cities, large and small, local languages no longer play a key role in people’s lives. For many of us, Indonesian is already enough. Unlike a local language, I can travel anywhere, from one end of the country to another, and still use Indonesian. Or at least this is what I have found. This also means that for my generation, and even more so for younger generations, Indonesian is becoming the means of transmission for new cultural forms that stretch across the country.
 
For now, in my daily life I use Indonesian to interact with people from different regions, and even sometimes with people from different countries. Meanwhile, kids much younger than me are doing new things with it, creating a novel, informal language that takes its inspiration from national Indonesian-language media.

Perhaps losing our connection to our many diverse local cultures is the price that must be paid for us to become a nation with one culture, Indonesia. A treasure our generation, and future generations, must sacrifice in order to gain something greater.

When visiting the old port of Sunda Kelapa in Jakarta, I was approached by a number of Bugis-speaking men, renting out boats to tour the area. When they greeted me, I instantly felt a loss. Perhaps at least the rental price would have been cheaper, if only I could have bargained in their local tongue.

+ Yerry Niko

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