From Heteroglossia to Polyglossia: The Creation of Malay and Dutch in the Indies

Abstract

Some data about the final years of the Dutch Indies for a start: in 1930,3,746,225 natives could read and write; this was 6.44 percent of the total native population of the Indies. In the same year, 75.2 percent of the Europeans (180,504 people) were considered literate, and 28.9 percent (or 344,147 people) of the Chinese population. Of the Europeans, 172,089 people could write Dutch, of the natives 187,708 (0.3 percent), and of the Chinese 40,095.Of the then almost 61 million inhabitants of the Dutch Indies, 1,482,402 children were registered as pupils of primary and continuation vernacular education. Of the children be tween 6 and 9 years of age, 34.5 percent were registered as "going to a school." Read against the background of the 6 percent literacy of the population as a whole, the report claimed that literacy was on the rise; but then almost half of these children were to leave school be fore they had finished the three years' curriculum available to them.

preliminary exploration

“…Perhaps this polylingualism is indeed a result of contemporary processes of "globalization." Or perhaps, if we take Maier's (1993) historical analysis of multilingualism in Indonesia, "heteroglossia" has always been the multilingual reality of Indonesia, a product of centuries of language contact and colonial experience. A heteroglossic/polylingual reality that has been masked, hidden and unrecognized by the language ideology prevalent in the study of language that posits the separation between languages as the natural/normal state of being (Irvine and Gal 2000, Makoni and Pennycook 2007, Errington 2008).…”

“…Studies on Indonesian youth 5 Ever since Indonesia's independence from the Netherlands, English has replaced Dutch as the de facto prestige foreign language (Tanner 1967). Due to the segregated policy of the Dutch colonial administration and the decision to use Standard Malay (now BI) as the administrative language with the local population (see Stoler 2002, Maier 1993and Groeneboer 1998, the Dutch language was never widely spoken in Indonesia.…”

A literary mirror; Balinese reflections on modernity and identity in the twentieth century

“…It should be noted here that the entire vocabulary of 'race' in Indonesia has been strongly infl uenced by colonial constructions of race and ethnicity. Important works on this subject include Maier 1993 andStoler 1996. the Malay translations of nineteenth-century European adventure and crime literature including Robinson Crusoe, The count of Monte Cristo and Sherlock Holmes and their adaptation into an Indonesian setting.…”

Some Cases for Culture

“…Maier [1993] provides a provocative case study in his account of the linguistic situation in Dutch East Indies before the adoption of a particular variety of Malay as the colonial language. I would characterize the highly heteroglossic social world he portrays as one of mutual partial intelligibility, remembering that the notion of mutual intelligibility is often used as a chief criterion for 'speaking the same language'.…”