On The History of Indonesian

ON THE HISTORY OF INDONESIAN
Author(s): H. STEINHAUER
Source: Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, Vol. 1, STUDIES IN SLAVIC AND GENERAL
LINGUISTICS (1980), pp. 349-375
Published by: Brill
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ON THE HISTORY OF INDONESIAN
H. STEINHAUER
Reasons or rationalizations why the choice of Malay

(henceforth called Indonesian) as the national language
of the present state of Indonesia was such a happy one,
have been mentioned on many occasions .
Compared with the other possible candidate for
becoming the national language, Javanese (being the
mother tongue of about half of the Indonesian population) ,
Malay was a rather insignificant language. Within
Indonesia , it was thought to be spoken only by the inhab-
itants of the Riau-Lingga archipelago and of the opposite
coasts of Sumatra. But for this very reason the choice
of Javanese would always have been felt as an extra
privilege of a language community which was already
privileged, or, as Prentice (p. 19) l puts it, as a "take-
over bid". Instead of becoming a unifying factor, it
would have given rise to separatist sentiments. The
recurrent bloody riots in India, any time the predominant
status of Hindi is mentioned, and similar difficulties
in other developing countries underline the exceptional
position of Indonesia with regard to the national lan-
guage question.
A second reason why Malay was preferable to Javanese
is more linguistic: it is less difficult than Javanese,
not only phonetically and morphologically, but also
lexically; as is known, Javanese has several thousands
350
of lexical morphemes and even a few grammatical ones,

the meanings of which contain complex status features
such as | being referred to on a non-official occasion
by THE speaker to indicate his/her socially lower status
than THE addressee1 s | (cf. Uhlenbeck, and for the
semantic notation and terminology Ebeling) . It reflects
a feudalist structure of society, and would therefore
have been in contradiction with the emancipatory
character of the struggle for national independence, of
which the proclamation in 1928 of Malay as the official
language of the future state of Indonesia was a part.
It would not have been in congruence either with the
social structure of most Indonesian cultures outside
Java and Bali. But even on these islands there are
dialects (West Sundanese, Banten Javanese, Jakarta Malay

and the Bali Aga dialects) in which the so-called lan-
guage levels are unknown.
A most important factor was also the fact that Malay
had a long history as a lingua franca. From old Chinese
and later also Persian and Arabic sources we know that
the East Sumatran empire of Srlwijaya from at least the

7th century onwards was an international centre of
Buddhist learning and a prospering state, economically
based on trade between China and India and the South-East
Asian islands. According to the famous Chinese Buddhist

pilgrim I-tsing, next to Sanskrit a language called
Koen-luen (I-tsing, p. 63, 159) rKou-luen (I-tsing, p. 183),
K'ouen-louen (Ferrand) , Kw'un-lun (Krom 1926, p. 106-107),
Kw'enlun (Takdir Alisjahbana 1971, p. 1089), kun'lun'
(Parnikel1, p.91), K'un-lun (Prentice, p. 19) was mastered
by various Chinese pilgrims studying Buddhist texts in
the early Srïwijaya empire. As the term Koen-luen> or
whatever would be its correct transcription, was used in
old Chinese reports for many South-East Asian peoples
351
and their languages (cf. Ferrand) , it may have meant

something like "southern barbarian", but in connection
with Sriwijaya, it is generally assumed to refer to a
language similar to the language of a number of stone-
inscriptions dating from the end of the 7th century and
found in the neighbourhood of Palembang (South-East
Sumatra) and on the island of Bangka. This language is
more related to classical Malay (see below) than to any
of the other known Austronesian languages, and has
therefore been identified as Old Malay. Two inscriptions
from Central Java, dated about fifty years later, are
written in a quite similar language, also identified as
Old Malay (it certainly is not Old Javanese) .
Of course it is not known what the relation was
between the language of the inscriptions and the spoken

language (s) in the areas where the inscriptions were
found. Even today hardly anything of linguistic value
is known about the many contemporary Malay-like lan-
guages or dialects along the eastern coast of Sumatra,
on the Malayan peninsula (including the southern provinces
of Thailand) , on the islands of the Malacca Straits and
along the coasts of Borneo. The distribution of the
latter and their marked difference with the inland
Bornean languages show them to be an - old - expansion

from what is still today the core of the Malay area, the
lands along the Malacca Straits.
As to Jakarta Malay the assumption is that it only
came into being in colonial times. It shows, however,
some archaic features, such as the preservation of the
opposition of /a/ and /a/ in final closed stem-syllables.
To my knowledge all phonetically reliable data on other
Malay dialects and Malay based creóles (see below) show
that there the original *a in final stem-syllables merges
with (the reflection of) *a. The possible explanations
352
of the oppositions in Jakarta Malay are:

a. influence of Javanese, Sundanese and/or Balinese
(Balinese slaves formed at one time a considerable
part of the Batavia population) ;

b. direct inheritance of an unknown archaic Malay dialect,
which could have been located in the Jakarta area
itself or in the Malay core area.

The short Old Malay inscriptions found near Bogor and
dating from 942 AD (see Bosch) could point to an early
Malay settlement in West Java.ia Next to eight Sanskrit
words it contains only five Old Malay words, of which
pangambat , translated by Bosch as "hunter", which has
the modern base hambat "chase, hinder"; in the second
meaning it has been reconstructed by R.A. Blust as
* ( S ) ambe (Dj ) 3 in which e stand for e (cf. Wurm and
Wilson). However, de Caspar is1 remark that in the Old
Javanese script /a/ was written as a before a consonant
cluster or in final syllables, could also be valid for
the script of the Old Malay epigraphs ("the non-expression
of the vowel in many cases is fully explained by the
absence, originally, of a distinct vowel mark in a
system of writing borrowed from India", de Casparis 1956,
p. 213). The Arabic script, used from approximately the
14th century onwards (the mutilated stone inscription
from Trengganu (Malaysia) of the year 1303 is the first
example, the next date from the 16th century) is also
less equipped to deal with fancy vowel distinctions. The
/a/ was sometimes expressed though, but in a way similar
to that of the Indian scripts, i.e. by doubling the
prevocalic consonant following the /a/; according to
Shellabear (1901, pp. 84-90) this habit was considered
Achehnese, however, and nowhere consistently practiced.
In any case, the Arab script does not give us much
information on this question.
353
Although the Chinese writing system and phonology

is an inefficient mechanism for reproducing non-Chinese
sounds, nevertheless the Chinese-Malay wordlist described
by Edwards and Blagden seems to indicate that in Malacca,
where it was compiled, the *e in final syllables already
had become /a/ in the 15th century. Edwards and Blagden
date the list between 1403 (the earliest date connected
with Malacca in Chinese records) and 1511 (when Malacca
was conquered by the Portuguese) : the list does not

contain Portuguese loanwords, while governmental terms
seem to point to Malay rulers. It is then the oldest
Malay wordlist extant. It contains 482 items (mostly
words, some phrases, and a number of duplications) . In
17 different words (21 in total) and *a is expected in
the final syllable: in all instances, however, the
Chinese transcription gives a, as - with two exceptions -
in the far more numerous cases of expected *a . In other
syllables *a is usually rendered by e or o , sometimes
u or i , and only in a few exceptional cases a (such as
an pen for [ambun] "dew", next to en pa for [ampat]
"four", and ling pu for [lambu] "ox"); a on the other
hand is the regular reflection of *a in non-final
syllables .
It is tacitly assumed that the opposition /a/ -
/a/ in final stem-syllables no longer existed in the
language of the Old Malay inscriptions. But as is shown
above, its non-phonemic spelling does not allow us even
to approximately estimate when the opposition in question
disappeared in the Malay dialects other than Jakarta
Malay.
As to the Jakarta facts themselves, only a careful
study of the different Jakarta dialects (Abdul Chaer
Mad'ie distinguishes five subdialects, pp. 4-7) and the
contribution of Javanese and other non-Malay languages,
354
can prove or disprove the hypothesis that one or more of

these languages called forth the opposition /a/ - /a/
discussed above. It is hoped that a forthcoming dialect-
geographical study on the Malay of Jakarta by CD. Grijns
will open up new perspectives.
What are called Malay dialects usually do not include
those dialects in West Sumatra which constitute the
Minangkabau and Kerinci languages. But they are closely

enough related to the Malay dialects to be considered
offsprings of proto-Malay. Therefore, the next ancient
Malay text (after the Trengganu stone) , a stone inscription
of the year 1356 found in the neighbourhood of Pagar-
ruyung (today Minangkabau area) , is not necessarily
proof of the use of Malay outside the Malay area. Neither
does its Old Malay language - as usual full of Sanskrit
words - proof that Minangkabau had not yet split off from
the Malay dialects. Teeuw's surmise is (1959, p. 149)
that "Old Malay remained in use as a written language
right up to the end of the Hindu Sumatran period."
Though the power of Sriwijaya from the 11th century
onwards gradually declined and its centre had moved from
Palembang to the north, to Melayu {Mo-lo-yeou in I-tsing,
identified as Jambi) , it remained of considerable impor-
tance, at least in the Malacca Straits areas, until its
total collapse at the end of the 14th century. The next
century shows the rapid rise of a new Malay state,
Malacca, which not only became the most important
commercial centre in South-East Asia, but also the main
diffusion centre of Islam. If it had not been so all the
time, Malay became (again) the language of interinsular

communication, but besides that it became the language
of the new religion.
Nothing is known of a literary tradition in
Sriwijaya, probably because with the change of religion
355
the demand for copies of Hindu-Buddhist works had dis-

appeared. It is certain that in various centres around
the Malacca Straits local Malay written literatures
existed, not only in Malay speaking areas, but also
elsewhere, such as in Aceh (in older English sources:
Acheen, Dutch: Atjèh) , which after the conquest of
Malacca by the Portuguese became the most important
commercial and religious centre in the area. There,
Malay remained the language of the elite up to this
century (Teeuw 1959, p. 153). The early Malay wordlist
of Van Elbinck was noted down in Aceh in 1604 (see Van
Ronkel 1896, pp. 13-18; Shellabear 1901, p. 89).

Voorhoeve (p. 22) mentions the existence (still in
the 19th century?) of a "general South Sumatran literary
idiom, which is basically Malay", used for instance in
the Lampung districts, the language of which is consid-
erably different from Malay (cf. D. F. Walker).
Also in the Minangkabau area a Malay written
literary tradition existed, most products of which date
from the 19th century. Their lexicon and hypercorrections
(such as Aoas instead of Aoeh) show them to be Minang-
kabau. The spelling, however, is clearly Malay: the
radical sound changes in final stem-syllables (such as
* -as becoming -eh) are not reflected in it.
Outside Sumatra Malay was used as a literary lan-
guage in for instance Banjarmasin, Brunei and Kutai on
Borneo and in Bima on Sumbawa. A kind of Malay was also
the language of two letters written in the name of the
sultan of Ternate to the king of Portugal in the early
16th century ( + 1521) . Blagden (1930) remarks that they
were clearly written by two different persons, both
non-Malays. Among other peculiarities they contain
examples of the "inverted genitive" construction,
characteristic for East Indonesian languages (AB instead
356
of West Indonesian BA for "A's B") 2, and in some places

the order "active" verb form - object (otherwise normal
for Malay) is replaced by the opposite order, a charac-
teristic of at least non-Austronesian languages found
in East Indonesia, such as the so-called North Halmahera
language group.3 The hybrid character of the letters

lends support to the supposition that an indigenous
Moluccan Malay did not yet exist. Bausani (1960 and 1972)
adduces further indirect evidence for his thesis that the
first European Malay wordlist, written by the famous

Italian ethnographer of Magellan's expedition around the
world (1519-1522) , Antonio Pigafetta, cannot be identi-
fied with such a form of Malay. He suggests that
Pigafetta' s informant must have been Magellan's personal
Sumatra-born slave, whom he had brought with him to Spain
as a trophy from his participation in the conquest of
Malacca. If this is true, it is unclear, however, how
Bausani' s alleged Philippine influence should be explained,
which would be visible in the high frequency of Z where
Sumatran Malay dialects - as far as I know - all have r.
Pigafetta describes how the above mentioned slave was
directly understood by the inhabitants of a small island
in the Suluan archipelago. Many other early European
sources mention the importance of Malay for interinsular
communication. Bausani (1972, p. 18) quotes a Portuguese
report of 1544 by Antonio Galvão, in which the spread
and general use of Malay is compared with those of Latin
in Europe. Jan Huygen van Linschoten in his Itinerario
(Part I, p. 74) remarks that "die in Indien die sprake
van Malaye niet en can, die en mach niet me, ghelijck
bij ons het Fransoys . " 4
Whatever the value may be of such comparisons, it
must be certain that, when the European expansion reached
the Archipelago, at least a pidginized variant of Malay
357
was widely spread as a trade language, while it was

- also for Europeans - associated with Islam. Pigafetta
(Bausani 1972, p. 15) calls the language of his wordlist
"the language of these Moorish people" (in distinction
to the language of his second - shorter - wordlist, the
"heathen" Bisayan) . Indeed the Portuguese proselytizing
activities, in the centre of their colonial activities,
i.e. on the island of Ambon, had no other choice than
to continue the use of Malay as the language of reli-
gious propaganda, Catholic this time. And also the Dutch,
having rid themselves of their Portuguese competitors
on Ambon, could not do otherwise, now for Protestant
pursuits. From the very beginning, however, the question

of what kind of Malay had to be used, divided the
Protestant minds. In a letter of 8-11-1612 by the Rev.
Rolandus to the church council of Amsterdam is recounted
that the edifying texts translated into Malay by A. Ruyl

"te seer hoofs waren getranslateert, vermits den Voorss.
Ruyl meest ten Heren hoven verkeerende, aldaer sijn
Malais geleert hadde, end daarom bij den Gouverneur
Houtman waren herstelt in gemeender Malais, om van de
gemeente aldaer, sijnde seer siecht volck, dies te beter
aangenomen te mögen worden ..." (quoted in C.W. Th. Baron
van Boetzelaer van Asperen en Dubbeldam, p.31)5. The
famous controversy, about one century later, between
Leydekker, the first translator of the complete Bible
into Malay, and Valentijn, who had been passed over for
the job, was also partly a matter of Malay.
There have been different ways of classifying the
variants of Malay in the course of time. The famous
British Sumatra expert, William Marsden (pp.xv-xvii)
distinguished four "styles" of Malay. The "courtly style"
(bhasa dalam) and the "style of the politer classes"
(bhasa bangsawan) only differ from each other in the
358
presence in the former of a small number of words with

status features pertaining to the king. Marsden admits
that they can in fact be considered the same; they con-
stitute the literary language. The third style is the
language of commerce {bhãsa dagang) , used by the i
insular traders and characterized by its being "less
elegant and less grammatical" than the former styles.
To this Marsden adds that the "European gentlemen may be
considered as belonging to this division." The last
style is the bhasa kaohukan, the "mixed jargon of the
bazars of great sea-port towns, a sort of language of
convention, of which Malayan is the basis." It will be
clear that some sectors of the population have been left
out in this enumeration.
The more usual division of Malay, however, was

binary. S. Takdir Alisjahbana (1957, p. 45) recalls a
number of labels, coined for such a division, of which
High and Low Malay are the most familiar. Though such
labels were not linguistically well-defined, the extremes
corresponding to them, were clear. On one end of the
scale there was the language of the many Dutch colonial
civil servants, about whom Drewes (1948, p. 24) remarked
that "die zieh in gemoede diets maakten dat zij 's lands
belang dienden met het bezigen en doen bezigen van een
jammerlijke brabbeltaal als het door hen gesproken
pasar-Maleis"6 (Marsden1 s "European gentlemen" must have
been of a different kind) .
As linguistics until the rise of .structuralism used

to be restricted to the study of written language, it is
not surprising that malayologists considered the language
of the best literary product, the Se jar ah Melayu (Malay
History) of the 16th century, as classical. It was the
other extreme of the scale and the yard-stick for all
kinds of Malay. So much so, that any deviation from this
359
ideal came to be qualified as corruption.

This bias towards classical. Malay engendered the
often ventured belief in the extreme stability of Malay:
except for its lexicon, which had been receptive to
different shifts of loan-words (first mainly from
Sanskrit, then from Arabic and Persian, finally from
European languages) , it actually was not expected to
change. The following is a random quotation to illustrate
this belief: "It is a remarkable fact that the Malay
language in the Straits of Malacca has remained practi-
cally, the same for centuries . . . the letters written
from the court of Acheen to Queen Elizabeth and King
James I of England could to-day be read and thoroughly
understood by any 4th standard boy in the Malay verna-
cular schools of the Straits Settlements" (Shellabear
1913, p. 49) . This, by the way, says more about the Malay
taught at schools than the Malay spoken outside them.
But one page further Shellabear makes the untenable
speculation that "The only important changes which have
taken place in the spoken language of the Malays in the
past 300 years appear to have been through the addition
of ... Arabic words ...". Teeuw (1959, p. 143-144) adduces
a beautiful example of this same belief in Malay con-
servatism, to wit Aichele's description of Old Malay as
classical Malay (ten centuries younger!) with Batak
influences .
It has been pointed out above, that there must have

existed more than one written Malay literary tradition.
But it seems extremely difficult to establish the rela-
tions between them and their mutual dependences, as the
copies available are rarely the original, while copying
apparently always implied rewriting. However, both
British and Dutch Malay experts agreed in their evocation
of Riau-Johore Malay as the representative of classical
360
Malay. It is true that the Riau and Johore courts were

the direct inheritants of the possibly Malaccan literary
tradition which produced the Sejarah Melayu, but about
the actual language spoken in Johore or the Riau archi-
pelago next to nothing was known. In any case, when the
Dutch Bible Association in the second half of last
century chose H.C. Klinkert to contrive a new translation

of the Scriptures, he was sent to Riau first to learn
adequate Malay; a translation into Low Malay was deemed
pernicious ""daar men dan licht een Bijbel in een dialect
overgezet zou kriijgen" ", while "eene vertaling des Bijbels
in onderscheiden Maleische dialecten nog bedenkeli jker
werd geacht"7 (Baron van Boetzelaer etc. 1941, pp. 44-45) .
The same normative approach of Malay was basic for
the Malay used and taught in government schools. These
were established since 1853, as the intensified coloni-
zation of the Dutch had heightened the need for lower
rank administrative personnel, which had to be recruited
from the indigenous population with a suitable education.
The language and education policy of the Dutch colonial
government has been too often described in other sources
(e.g. Takdir Alisjahbana 1957 and 1971) to be repeated

here. Suffice it to stress the considerable discrepancy
between the school Malay and the spoken forms of Malay.
It parallelled the discrepancy between daily life and
other subjects treated: 19th century Dutch songs, which
are chauvinistic enough to be called racist, long ago
suppressed by the Dutch themselves, are still vividly
remembered by many Indonesians of the older generation;
one can still come across Indonesians who are able to
solemnly recite the stations of the pre-war railway line

between Groningen and Nieuwe Schans in the Northern
Netherlands, etc.
One of the most influential advocates of classical
361
Malay was C.A. van Ophuysen. He wrote an authoritative

grammar (1910, second enlarged edition 1915) , and as he
was Inspector General of Malay Schools, his influence
could be widely disseminated.
Drewes (1948, p. 16) loathed the linguistic conserv-
atism of the educational (and religious) circles: more
than anybody else they had stuck to the classical liter-
ary language "zonder echt ooit meer dan een dorre en
volmaakt levenloze taal voort te brengen en voort te
planten".8
With all its negative aspects, however, the educa-
tion system had also positive results: on the one hand
it engendered the demand for a better education system,
equivalent to the one Dutch children were subject to;
on the other hand it roused a growing consciousness of
one's own, Indonesian, values. Budi Utomo (established
in 1908) was the first of the emancipatory movements
based on such a consciousness. Though it was inspired
by Javanese culture, it used Malay in most of its
publications, so that also the Sundanese and Madurese
speaking population of Java could be reached, while at
the same time the pitfalls of the Javanese language
levels could be avoided.
The logical next phase in the development was the

rise of Indonesian nationalism. And on October 28, 1928,
on the All-Indonesian Youth Congress Malay was proclaimed
to be (come) the national language of Indonesia, hence-
forth to be called bahasa Indonesia "Indonesian".
With regard to spoken Malay there are, as we have

seen above:
1. a multitude of Malay vernaculars in the Malay core

area and along the coasts of Borneo;
2. the Malay-like languages - themselves groups of
362
dialects - such as Minangkabau and Kerinci;

3. Jakarta Malay, heavily influenced by non-Malay lan-
guages;
4 . the pidgin Bazar Malay (probably in more than one

variant) .
Based on the latter moreover a variety of creóles

developed, especially in East Indonesia. I mention
Manado Malay, Ambon Malay, Ternate Malay, Banda Malay,
Kupang Malay and New Guinea Malay (the latter probably
to be divided into Jayapura, Fak-fak and Merauke Malay) .
Given the normative approach to Malay, it will be no
surprise that these creóles used to meet with disapproval.
In so far as they were discussed at all the stress was
laid on the lexicon, and more specifically on the non-
Malay element in it. As far as I know, we are yet the
best informed on Manado Malay, thanks to two unpublished
studies about it (a dictionary by Martha Salea, and a
grammatical description' by Shirley Schmitt, 1975 and
1976). For the rest, Teeuw's survey of the existing
sources on these creóles (1961, pp. 48-49) still seems to
be valid today: of Ternate Malay there are texts, of
Ambon Malay also (old) wordlists, of Kupang Malay only
(short and old) wordlists, and of the other Malay creóles
nothing at all. Neither is anything known of the Malay
of the South Moluccan communities in the Netherlands
(estimated today at about 40,000 people) !

Another creole which has to be mentioned is the
so-called Baba Malay, which used to be the language

spoken by many Straits-born Chinese. Characteristics of
it have been discussed in an article by Shellabear (1913) ;
its development since is unknown, however.
The rise of these various creóles may be largely
due to the commercial and population policies of the
colonialist powers. Their activities also meant the end
363
of classical Malay literature. As literacy used to be

a court privilege and as the main genre of classical
Malay literature was a mixture of chronicle and fairy-
tale , in which the patriotism of local leaders and their
predecessors was an important element, the incentive to
produce such literature disappeared when the Dutch took
over power in all corners of the Archipelago in the
course of last century (in Aceh only in 1904) . In the
course of this century a new - modern - Indonesian
literature came up, in the early phases of which Minang-
kabau authors played a prominent part. This is not the
place, however, to give a historical survey of modern
Indonesian literature. I refer to Teeuwfs most expert
study of it (1979) . Suffice it to say that in their
language they built forth upon the old literary idiom,
though minangkabauisms can be observed.
But besides this more or less official literature
- it was stimulated by the governmental Bureau for

Popular Literature (established in 1908, but starting
its influential activities only about 1920) - a literary
subculture arose within the Chinese community. As in the
Malay peninsula, many Chinese who had in the course of
some generations lost contact with their relatives in
China, started to assimilate culturally to their new

environment. Their language was in many cases no longer
Chinese, but a creolized Malay. And in this language
they started to produce translations of Chinese popular
stories since the end of last century, and later also
original literature, as well as a number of local news-
papers. Nio Joe Lan (1962, chapters I and II) describes
how, by a kind of apartheid policy - Chinese had to live
in special quarters and to attend special schools -
their integration into local society was hampered. Only
after independence could their written Malay dissolve
36 4
into modern Indonesian.
This in the meantime had started to develop radi-

cally. The Japanese occupation, in its effort to eradi-
cate everything Dutch, had to make Indonesian the
official language of the country. In October 1942 the
enormous task of modernizing the language was begun. The
most important part of this task lay in the field of
terminology. Takdir Alisjahbana (1971, p. 1097) mentions
the figure of 250,000 words having been coined "to date".
"It is clear, however," he adds, "that not all of the
terms decided on have been accepted and are used in the
living language." Nevertheless the results are impressive.
In 1972 after long negotiations a spelling reform
was carried out, which made an end to the differences
between the Indonesian and Malaysian writing systems.

In the early days of the Indonesian republic also
a number of normative grammars appeared. They did not so
much differ in the phenomena described as well in the
labels applied to them. The sometimes emotional discus-
sions about them were published in national linguistic
journals such as Pembina Bahasa Indonesia (1948-1957)
and Medan Bahasa (1951- ) . Compared with previous
grammars only a few innovations found recognition. I
mention an originally Javanese technique of nominaliza-
tion with the suffix -nya, which today is very productive.
An example, which combines this technique with word
compounding (unfrequent in Indonesian) is e.g. di-satu-
kelompok-kan-nya semua konstruksi genitival "the being
combined of all genitive constructions into one group"
{di- passive prefix, satu "one" kelompok "group" -kan
causative suffix; found in Sudaryanto 1979, p. 56).
Another innovation is the use of the verbal stem preceded
by mereka "they" or beliau "(s)he (honorific) ", expressing
the actor in relative clauses. With regard to this and
365
similar constructions, and - connected with it - the
question of the Indonesian "passive" forms, Takdir

Alisjahbana speaks in his grammar (in the first Malaysian
edition of 1963, which I used, volume II, pp. 31-34) of
a crisis. I hope to return to the problem of the Indo-
nesian passive in a separate article. Suffice it to say
here, that, whatever the active-passive opposition used
to be according to the existing normative grammars, the
same description could not be maintained because practice
had become different. These are problems that any norma-
tive grammar has to face. But in the case of Indonesia
an undivided national language and consequently a norma-
tive grammar of it were political necessities. Though
Takdir Alis jahbana's discussion on social and regional
language varieties (1957, p. 47) would not be out of
place in any sociolinguistic handbook, his conclusion
had to be different: there is just one Indonesian lan-
guage .
As long as the term "language" is as vague as it is

in everyday use, we might support this conclusion, but
it implied that there was just one possible Indonesian
grammar (which did not contain rules describing social
and regional variation) . And, as we saw, this grammar
was ultimately based on the Riau-Johore literary tradi-
tion.
In Malaysia and Brunei Malay also became the

national language; in Singapore as well, but here it is
also an "official" language alongside English, Chinese
and Tamil. For a discussion of these developments and
the differences with the Indonesian situation, I refer
to Takdir Alisjahbana (1971) and to the excellent article
of D.J. Prentice (1978).
It is often said that Indonesian is "spoken" by more
366
than 120 million people, or whatever the population of

Indonesia is estimated to be when the assertion is made.
This, of course, is an exaggeration, unless "spoken"

means "supported". The number of people who could be
claimed to be born speakers of Indonesian is limited,
and this spoken Indonesian ranges, as we saw above, from
a local Malay-like dialect to a Malay-based creole. The
Standard Indonesian is therefore for the vast majority
of Indonesians at best a second language, their first
language being - if not one of the deviating Malay
dialects or creóles - one of the several hundred other
languages of Indonesia, either belonging to the Austro-

nesian or non-Austronesian (Papuan) language families.
However, this situation is rapidly changing. In the
first place variants of the spoken language are gaining
field for a variety of reasons:
1 . As the social hierarchies have changed dramatically
- they are based now on education, wealth and civil
or military rank, no longer on blood and age only -
the choice of the right language level in those lan-
guages which have such a system has become difficult
enough to be avoided on many occasions; the use of
Indonesian is then an elegant way out.
2. The larger mobility of the population results in a
growing number of mixed marriages in which Indonesian
is the common language.
3. The number of parents who raise their children in
Indonesian seems to grow anyway. The questionable
philosophy behind this seems to be that since Indo-
nesian is the language of education, it would be a
too heavy burden for the children to have another
language as their mother tongue .
4. The growing urbanization brings many people together
with a different ethnic background; the intensified
367
inter-ethnic communication occurs usually in Indo-

nesian. Cities and larger towns on the whole tend to
become Indonesian speaking islands in a different
language environment;9 their comparatively metropol-
itan character makes their language also prestigious,
certianly on a local scale.
In most of the above mentioned cases the Indonesian
spoken will be of such a locally prestigious kind. In

the Sundanese capital Bandung, for instance, the philo-
sophy mentioned under 3. above is increasingly adhered
to; the influence of Jakarta Malay is particularly strong
among the younger generation (Mr.Husein Widjajakusumah,
personal communication) ì ° . In North Celebes the local
languages are threatened with extinction by Manado Malay.
Among the younger generations there are practically no
longer active speakers of Tonsea (Mr.J. Akun Danie,
personal communication) , nor of Bantik (Mr.G. Bawole,
personal communication) . Some 50 years ago N. Adriani
(e.g. 1925, p. 143) already complained about the growing
influence of Manado Malay, which he despised.
Yet it is to be expected that the local Malay
vernaculars will in the end merge ever more with the
official Indonesian, which in its turn will not remain
the same .
As the official language it is used on official

occasions. As in other countries, neither in Indonesia
is it unusual that the official character of such an
occasion becomes an aim in itself. The result is often
a mantra-like "officialese" with a minimalized communi-
cative function. I quote a rather random example from

the newspaper Kompas of 4-3-1976, pronounced on the
occasion of the transfer of command of the XVIth mili-
tary district: " " . . .Ketahanan Nasional ... harus akomo-
datip sifatnya bagi modal sosial, baik yang secara nyata
368
dapat dilihat seperti: tata-sosial, nilai-nilai sosial,

nilai-nilai agama, nilai-nilai kulturil yang tersimpan
dalam legenda, mythos , epos dan lain-lainnya, maupun
yang masih menjadi deposit batin yang sukar dirumuskan
tetapi telah mendarah-daging . serta menjadi motivasi
kepahlawanan bangsa .IMl11
However, the official Indonesian is also used under
more normal circumstances, in government and education

(since a few years from the first grade of the elemen-
tary school onwards, gradually replacing the local lan-
guage in the course of the second and third grade before) .
This does not imply, however, that the knowledge of
Standard Indonesian is now practically general. The
change-over from pre-war elite education to mass-
education after independence had to be realized at the
expense of quality. Sufficiently educated teachers were
not always available, and even if so, their knowledge
of Indonesian was not always first-hand, neither had
their linguistic training been very sophisticated.
In a recently reprinted bundle of articles which
were originally written between 1966 and 1974, Harimurti
Kridalaksana criticizes the educational approach to
Indonesian. He pleads for a positive evaluation of its
non-standard forms. Unless the implicit claim of the
general applicability of Standard Indonesian is denied
explicitly and its limited function alongside the non-
standard forms is stressed, the attitude (not uncommon
among school-children) towards it as something unpractical
which has to be learnt by heart only to get a certificate,
will not change.
A comparable negative attitude towards Indonesian
réveils itself in the use of foreign words where Indo-
nesian words are available. Before the war a Dutch edu-
cation was a sign of social achievement. Consequently
369
the use of Dutch words became among a number of people

a symbol of high social status. And this remained so
until years after independence, in spite of the heavy
critic launched against it on many occasions (see for
instance the older issues of Medan Bahasa and Pembina
Bahasa Indonesia) . More recently an education in

America has acquired the highest status value. And
Amran Halim (1976, p. 59) warns against excessive and
unnecessary use of English, the new status language. A
rather extreme example of such use was discussed in
Kompas of 30-3-1976. It was a recorded speech, held in
January, 1972 by a high official. I quote the first
sentence cited in Kompas (the English words and morphemes,
all of which can easily be replaced by Indonesian
equivalents, are italicized): " " . . . saya usulkan dalam
workshop ini agar kita lebih dahulu men-tackle masalah
upgrading petugas-petugas kita yang like it or not harus
kita akui bahwa eighty procents achievement mereka jauh
di bawah level standard, bahkan banyak pengetahuan
mereka sudah out of date.'1"11 Although this kind of
Indonesian can be heard even on ministerial level
(complete with a heavy Javanese accent and the Javanese

morpheme -ken for the very frequent Indonesian morpheme
-kan) , it can nevertheless be considered an isolated
exception.
On the future development of Indonesian the influ-
ence of Javanese will have a more lasting effect. With
the coinage of new terms for instance a word from a
major language within Indonesia is preferred to a foreign
word. And a Javanese word is immediately acceptable for
about half of the Indonesian population. Moreover, the
educational infrastructure of Java has always been
better, both qualitatively and quantitatively (see
Takdir Alisjahbana for pre-war figures) . And as also
370
Yogyakarta (in Central Java) was the seat of government

in the early days of the Republic, the number of
Javanese officials in influential governmental and mili-
tary positions is not only absolutely but also relatively
great, which reinforces again the prestige of the
Javanese language .
Perhaps even stronger than the influence of Javanese
is the influence of Jakarta Malay. As the language of the
capital it is the symbol of progress and of everything
modern. Because of that it is the only non-standard form
of Indonesian which is regularly to be heard in national
radio and television programs.
For some time already radio is found everywhere;
and since about two years satélite television with local
relay stations are conquering the villages (accumulators
are used when other electricity is not yet available) .
Moreover, Indonesia has a highly productive film
industry. As it is difficult for theatres to obtain
other than Indonesian movies, and as Jakarta Malay is
frequently used in the latter, its influence is all the
more noticeable. So much so that quite a number of
writers, especially of the more popular kind of novel,
litter their language with Jakartanisms .
What the results eventually will be of all these
developments for the structure and vocabulary of Indo-
nesian and for the language map of Indonesia cannot be
predicted. It certainly will take some more decades
before Indonesian has sufficiently stabilized to enable
a synchronie description which is valid for more than
a few years and for a majority of speakers.
University of Leiden
371
NOTES
*See the bibliography at the end of this paper.

*a Dr.J. Noorduyn stressed in personal communication the specula-
tive character of such a conclusion: pure Sanskrit inscriptions
from approximately the same time and area do not point to a
"Sanskrit" population.
2Mr. Don Flassy informed me that the inversed genitive also occurs
in the contemporary Malay of Jayapura (Irian Jaya) , but apparently
only in some compoundlike (?) expressions, such as [mata buiu]
"eyelash" (lit. eye hair) instead of Standard Indonesian Jbulu mata.
Similarly [api lida] "flame" (lit. fire tongue) , [prau kamudi]
"helm of a prow", instead of Standard Indonesian lidah api and
kemudi perahu. On the other hand with Standard word order: [bulu
katia] "armpit hair" (Indonesian Jbulu ketiak) .
3See Van der Veen 1915. The languages of Ternate and Tidore belong
to this group. That Ternatan nowadays has an exceptional position
- in most cases it has the order verb-object - is due, according
to Van der Veen (p. 45) , to Austronesian influence.
4 "Anybody who does not know Malay in the Indies will n
where, as with French with us."
"were translated in a too courtly manner, because the aforesaid
Ruyl mostly associating with the court of the Lord, had there
learnt his Malay, and therefore (they) were rewritten by Governor
Houtman in commoner Malay, so that they may be all the better
accepted by the community there, who were very lowly folk..."
6 "who were earnestly convinced that they were serving the i
of the country by using and causing to be used such a miserable
jibber ish as the Bazar Malay that they spoke."
7""for one would then easily end up with a Bible translate
a dialect""; "a translation of the Bible into distinct Malay
dialects was considered even more Questionable."
"without, however, ever producing or developing anything more
than a dry and completely lifeless language."
9Walker (1976, p.l) for instance remarks: "Indonesian ..
increasingly used by Lampung people in the city as a first language.
More and more Lampung young people in the city of Tanjungkarang-
Telukbetunq do not speak the Lampuncr lancruaae at all."
iUIn personal communication Mr. Dudu Prawiraatmaja estimated that
the number of papers and journals written in Sundanese, as well as
their circulation have been decimated since 1965.
11 "National Defence has to be of an accomodative character
social capital, not only for the clearly visible capital, such as:
social etiquette, social values, religious values, cultural values
which are hidden in legends, myths, epics and so forth, but also
the capital that is still a spiritual deposit which it is diffi-
cult to formulate, but which already has become second nature as
well as a motivation for the» hprni.qm nf fhp nat-i on _ "
12||I propose in this workshop that we should first
372
question of the upgrading of our functionaries, about whom we have

to admit, whether we like it or not, that their 80% achievement is
far below standard level, and much of their knowledge is even out
of date."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adriani, N.
1925 "De Minahasische talen", Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-
en Volkenkunde 81, 134-164
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1942-1943 "Die altmalaiische Literatursprache und ihr Einfluss
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Sprachen XXXIII, 37-66
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1976 "Pola Kebijaksanaan Bahasa Nasional", Bahasa dan Sastra
II nr.3, 55-64
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1972 "L'Indonesia nella relazione di viaggio di Antonio
Pigafetta", Relazioni di viaggiatori italiani in Indo-
nesia 2, 167 pp.
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Blagden, CO.
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de Caspar is, J.G.
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Cense; A.A.
1978 "Maleise invloeden in het oostelijk deel van de Indo-
nesische Archipel", Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en
Chaer Mad'ie, Abdul
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Coedès,G.
1930 "Les Inscriptions Malaises de Çrïvijaya", Bulletin de
l'Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient XXX, 29-80
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1948 Van Maleis naar Basa Indonesia, Leiden, 39 pp.
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Ebeling, CL.
1978 Syntax and Semantics , A taxonomic Approach, Leiden, xii
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Edwards, E.D., and CO. Blagden
1930-1932 "A Chinese Vocabulary of Malacca Malay Words and
Phrases collected between AD. 1403 and 1511 (?) ",
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van Pagarroejoeng en Soeroaso", Oudheidkundig Verslag
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Indië, Bijlage H, 51-52
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+ 2 maps
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On The History of Indonesian

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On The History of Indonesian

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ON THE HISTORY OF INDONESIAN

Reasons or rationalizations why the choice of Malay

of lexical morphemes and even a few grammatical ones,

Java and Bali. But even on these islands there are

dialects (West Sundanese, Banten Javanese, Jakarta Malay

the East Sumatran empire of Srlwijaya from at least the

Asian islands. According to the famous Chinese Buddhist

and their languages (cf. Ferrand) , it may have meant

between the language of the inscriptions and the spoken

Bornean languages show them to be an - old - expansion

of the oppositions in Jakarta Malay are:

part of the Batavia population) ;

itself or in the Malay core area.

Although the Chinese writing system and phonology

was conquered by the Portuguese) : the list does not

can prove or disprove the hypothesis that one or more of

Minangkabau and Kerinci languages. But they are closely

time, Malay became (again) the language of interinsular

the demand for copies of Hindu-Buddhist works had dis-

Ronkel 1896, pp. 13-18; Shellabear 1901, p. 89).

of West Indonesian BA for "A's B") 2, and in some places

language group.3 The hybrid character of the letters

first European Malay wordlist, written by the famous

was widely spread as a trade language, while it was

pursuits. From the very beginning, however, the question

that the edifying texts translated into Malay by A. Ruyl

presence in the former of a small number of words with

The more usual division of Malay, however, was

As linguistics until the rise of .structuralism used

ideal came to be qualified as corruption.

It has been pointed out above, that there must have

Malay. It is true that the Riau and Johore courts were

century chose H.C. Klinkert to contrive a new translation

(e.g. Takdir Alisjahbana 1957 and 1971) to be repeated

solemnly recite the stations of the pre-war railway line

Malay was C.A. van Ophuysen. He wrote an authoritative

The logical next phase in the development was the

With regard to spoken Malay there are, as we have

1. a multitude of Malay vernaculars in the Malay core

dialects - such as Minangkabau and Kerinci;

4 . the pidgin Bazar Malay (probably in more than one

Based on the latter moreover a variety of creóles

(estimated today at about 40,000 people) !

so-called Baba Malay, which used to be the language

of classical Malay literature. As literacy used to be

- it was stimulated by the governmental Bureau for

China, started to assimilate culturally to their new

into modern Indonesian.

This in the meantime had started to develop radi-

between the Indonesian and Malaysian writing systems.

similar constructions, and - connected with it - the

question of the Indonesian "passive" forms, Takdir

As long as the term "language" is as vague as it is

In Malaysia and Brunei Malay also became the

It is often said that Indonesian is "spoken" by more

than 120 million people, or whatever the population of

This, of course, is an exaggeration, unless "spoken"

languages of Indonesia, either belonging to the Austro-

inter-ethnic communication occurs usually in Indo-

spoken will be of such a locally prestigious kind. In

As the official language it is used on official

cative function. I quote a rather random example from

datip sifatnya bagi modal sosial, baik yang secara nyata