Language, learning and community in Eastern Indonesia

• In Event: Roundtable Session 1
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Comparative Education and Teaching

Proposal

Against the backdrop of increasing language loss in Indonesia, this paper investigates how contestation over minority language rights in education problematizes the Indonesian government’s expressed goal of unity and diversity. Specifically, I examine the case of Nusa Tenggara Timur Province (NTT), an economically marginalized region of eastern Indonesia that is also home to extraordinary linguistic diversity with approximately 70 distinct languages, of which 30 are considered endangered (Catalogue of Endangered Languages, 2019).
Drawing upon survey data with 150 respondents and interview data with 25 respondents from NTT, I show how ideas about language in public spaces (“official spaces” like post offices and government bureaucratic offices), private spaces, and schools are negotiated and renegotiated as village demographics shift, and as governmental support for teaching and using minority languages waxes and wanes.
I highlight three sets of findings. First, survey and interview data showed that most respondents did not feel their language to be endangered, even though fewer young people spoke the language as a mother tongue. Second, perceptions about the way that minority languages should be taught varied dramatically among respondents. Over half of respondents thought that their minority language was “easily taught and acquired” and that the dominant variable in how the ease or difficulty of acquiring language had nothing to do with language structure or grammar, but the learners’ levels of motivation and interest. Further, nearly all respondents, in both survey and interviews, said that minority languages should be taught through oral methods. Finally, there was the question of which minority language should be taught as a mulok (local curriculum) in schools. In communities with more than one minority language, how should educators balance the needs of students from different ethnolinguistic groups? This issue—which was not purely theoretical, as it was indeed the case in several towns in the focal regencies—did not strike most respondents as a problem. In their interview responses, research subjects affirmed the idea that within their villages, they were monolingual. However, there was a sense that the regencies and NTT Province were extremely multilingual, but not within the confines of any particular village.
Taken together, these findings highlight the heterogenous and often contradictory responses to state policy on multilingual education and minority language rights in Indonesia. State policy is one (albeit outsized) factor in the widespread language shifts observed across Indonesia, from local languages to the national language. At the same time, Bahasa Indonesia has often been viewed as necessary for academic and career advancement. Thus, even as local languages are considered central to the identity of many ethnolinguistic groups, the combined forces of historically-stringent language policies at schools and the pull of socioeconomic advancement have led to the increasing dominance of Bahasa Indonesia—and concomitant local language loss—across the archipelago.
By studying how minority language rights are framed and contested within education policy, curriculum, and the politics of everyday life, this study provides insight into processes of ethnolinguistic categorization and regimentation, identity formation, and multilingual teaching and learning.

Author

• Jenny F Zhang, The Spencer Foundation