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xactly five years ago, on Oct. 28, a scholar wrote in The Jakarta Post about the Youth Pledge and the dream for a better Indonesia. His writing was nuanced with a personal and surreal longing for a great Indonesia. However, the article was shot through with disenchantment leading to apathy about the weakening spirit of the Youth Pledge.

In the writer’s view, this weakening of spirit was mainly caused by the deteriorating use of the Indonesian language.

Many students, he says, are no longer patriotic because they would rather speak English than Indonesian. With all due respect, such a view, aside from being expressed in English, is elitist and erroneous.

According to the 2010 census from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), the Indonesian language is spoken by at least 156 million people and the number is definitely growing, making it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

When compared to the national languages of India, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, Indonesian is perhaps the only language that has achieved the status of a national language in the true sense of the term (Dardjowidjojo, 1994) — functioning as the sole means of communication among various ethnic groups speaking over 400 mutually unintelligible vernaculars.  

Furthermore, it serves a political purpose as the unifier of the archipelago.

But this was not a spur-of-the-moment development. The fact that Indonesian enjoys its present status as the national and official language, according to Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana, was the result of historical and social processes with many political and sociological conflicts. Malay, where it all began, served as a trading language in the island ports of Southeast Asia, the very hub of which is the area now called Indonesia.

Ki Hajar Dewantara, the founding father of national education, predicted in 1916 that Indonesian would become the obvious language for the whole of the Indies because it did not require much of a philosophical aptitude to learn it.

This was then reiterated by Muhammad Yamin in 1926 at the first Youth Congress in Batavia, what is known today as Jakarta.

In his address, quoted by Robson (2002), Yamin said that Malay already had the upper hand in both commercial and economic life, as well as in political life. He was convinced that gradually Malay would be the language of conversation or the language of unity for Indonesians and that the future Indonesian culture would find its expression in that language.

Two years later, a daring decision was made by the educated few, the most prominent of whom was, of course, Yamin. They pledged to hold up high the language of unity, the Indonesian language.

Malay was then immediately adopted by overlooking the linguistic varieties, regional differences and social settings of the period.

So, Indonesian was never entirely there to begin with. But its gradually progressive nature operates as fertile ground to keep it in existence. It borrows thousands of words from here, there and everywhere, mostly from Dutch and English. Even the spelling system had to go through a series of standardization processes, the first of which was established by Charles van Ophuijsen and Engku Nawawi before being replaced by the Suwandi in March 1947, and then perfected with the EYD in 1972. The latest version is the Ejaan Bahasa Indonesia, released in 2015.

The language was initially spoken by just 6 percent of the total population, but it has grown dramatically since then. Therefore, worrying that Facebook users updating their status messages in English might harm the national language, or endanger the “spirit of patriotism”, seems a little farfetched.

Languages die out not because people resort to foreign languages, but because people start to act exclusively about them, as if one language stands separately from another; or because language teachers focus more on correction instead of embracing difference; or because proud young Indonesian scholars distance themselves from the rest of the population by, for example, resorting to old spelling that makes their work incomprehensible.

Mind you, people never protest if I mix my Indonesian with Sundanese or a little Javanese, but they lose their minds if I add in an English word or two, calling me names and whatnot.

To give you another example, Indonesians never seem to mind if a foreigner speaks broken Indonesian. They will even praise them as polyglot travelers.

Mixing languages or inserting foreign words, on the one hand, implies linguistic incompetence or a cultural inferiority complex. On the other hand, it could mean that the speaker is learning a new language. It does not necessary mean that, in so doing, the national language is on the verge of extinction, or is becoming insufficient for keeping the country intact. It does not have to serve that purpose, anyway.

Eighty-eight years ago, on Oct. 28, Yamin was a young nationalist in his twenties whose privileged upbringing led him to this dream of unity.
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The writer is a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts at Padjadjaran University, Bandung, and a researcher at Leiden University, the Netherlands.