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Language body adds subentries to 'perempuan' in KBBI
The definition of perempuan in the latest, fifth edition of the dictionary and its online version has not changed, defining women through their reproductive organs.
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Women participate in an International Women's Day march in front of Sarinah department store, Central Jakarta, on Sunday 8 March 2020. (JP/Donny Fernando)
T
he Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry’s Language Development Agency has added several new subentries to perempuan (woman) in the online version of the Great Dictionary of the Indonesian Language (KBBI), several months after activists protested the listing of only derogatory terms under the word.
The entry now contains compound nouns such as perempuan karier (career woman), perempuan idaman (ideal woman) and perempuan suci (holy woman).
Prior to the change, it only included pejorative terms that mostly implied promiscuity, including perempuan lacur (prostitute), perempuan jalang (bitch) and perempuan nakal (promiscuous woman), as well as perempuan jahat (evil woman). These had been included years ago but the controversy made rounds on social media in February after singer Asteriska posted a photo of her wearing a T-shirt printed with the derogatory explanations and a caption urging a change.
The definition of perempuan in the latest, fifth edition of the dictionary and its online version has not changed, defining women through their reproductive organs. This has also been criticized by activists since its 2005 inclusion in the fifth KBBI edition.
But the Language Development Agency has refused to remove the derogatory subentries in the KBBI despite objections from activists, saying that the dictionary reflected words used in the common Indonesian lexicon.
“The subentries for the entry perempuan [...] can be used as an example of the greater public views on women and what connotations are attached to being a woman,” it wrote in a statement on Feb. 2.
“Any negative connotations and [associated] stigma can be changed, not by revising the entry in the KBBI, but by [reclaiming] the social connotations and stigma [...] Only then can new entries with more positive meanings appear in the corpus, which is then naturally recorded in the KBBI.”
