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By the way ... Killing the Indonesian language, hara-kiri style
There are many ways to kill a language, but in Indonesia, the national language is being murdered every day by all sorts of people â by naming their groups, companies or organizations and their products and services in English or in abbreviated gobbledygook no one can recognize
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T
here are many ways to kill a language, but in Indonesia, the national language is being murdered every day by all sorts of people ' by naming their groups, companies or organizations and their products and services in English or in abbreviated gobbledygook no one can recognize.
But the ultimate double murder was committed by a 'twenty nine my age' man who recently burst into notoriety with his 'bahasa intelek' (smart talk) conflated from English and Indonesian words into mumbo-jumbos like 'harmonisisasi' (harmonization), 'labil ekonomi' (economic instability) or 'kudeta hati' (heart coup d'état), as he wooed his singer-dancer girlfriend ' whose last name was 'Gotik' (short for 'goyang itik' or 'duck's shuffle', for the way she grinds her bum when performing).
But the young man was not unique in that 'crime'. Mixing up syllables from several words to form a portmanteau is a rampant linguistic habit in Indonesia. All the media (especially the TV industry), with their insatiable hunger to economize on print space and sound bites do it, for the money, not the country.
And the government, which is supposed to be doing it for the country, is more than happy to oblige by cooking up many more tasteless alphabet soups to kill our linguistic appetite, if not the language itself.
'Bareskrim' and 'Kejagung', for instance, have nothing to do with ice cream or jagung (corn), but they are two government institutions ' the National Police's Criminal Investigation Corps and the Attorney General's Office respectively ' that put criminals behind bars, including the 'twenty nine my age' man himself for cheating.
But there is no greater killer of the Indonesian language than today's youth, who speak gibberish consisting of half-broken English, which they call 'bahasa gaul' (slang), complete with disjointed and newfangled vocabularies like 'ngetren' (trendy), 'kren' (fashionable) and 'gokil' (crazy).
They are the new Indonesian 'Me Generation', characterized by their mindless use of the word 'aku' (me) when they speak.
But the trend toward excessive construction of new words proliferated even in the old days and none other than the self-proclaimed 'mouthpiece' of the Indonesian people that concocted such bizarre acronyms (all meaningless now), such as 'Nekolim' (neo-colonialist imperialism) or 'Nasakom' ' an abbreviation of nasionalisme (nationalism), agama (religion), komunisme (communism).
Now, his own name and that of his vice president (Soekarno-Hatta) have been abbreviated by people as 'Soetta' (as in the name of Jakarta's airport), in a kind of vulgar reversal of karma or even an act of cultural blasphemy, as the duo are Indonesia's famous founding fathers.
But Sukarno, along with his education minister Mohammad Yamin, also represents a creative generation that issued the 1955 law to replace the Dutch suffix '-eit' with '-as' ' leading to the popularization of words like 'universitas' (university), 'fakultas' (faculty) and 'realitas' (reality).
Such creative innovation still exists today, as prefixes 'pra-' (for pre-), 'pasca' (for post-) and 'swa-' (for self-) have meanwhile been introduced.
Otherwise, most of the words recently minted by the media, such as 'pemirsa' (viewers, from 'penonton') or 'pariwara' (commercial, from 'iklan'), are not necessary, because they replaced perfectly good, existing Indonesian words. Other words, such as 'klasika' (from 'classified ads') or 'rutinitas' (from routine) are just plain wrongly translated.
It is true that borrowing of words from other languages has been the mainstay of most languages in the world and Indonesian is no exception.
Globalization is killing every language, including English itself, by its own bastardized siblings like Singlish, Manglish, Chinglish and Inglish.
But with the Indonesian language, it is no longer borrowing words from English, but the wholesale mimicking and parroting of English expressions that is really disturbing.
Although this cultural 'disease' has been identified and diagnosed, the trend (dubbed 'Indo-Saxonization' in The Indonesian Quarterly article of April 1977) has continued unabated, except now the infestation has come from consuming too many alphabet soups and English-labeled consumer goods without feeling the slightest of intestinal or intellectual diarrhea.
'As the language goes, so goes the culture,' they say, so this linguistic hara-kiri has got to stop. Although legislating against or limiting the use of foreign words and mandating the use of local ones has been tried in other countries with marginal success, it is never too late to try to stop the bleeding. If not, the Indonesian language as we know it will be dead or 'labil' as a 'bahasa intelek', to paraphrase our 'twenty nine my age' language killer himself.
Ziad Salim
