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On Language On Language
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On Names and Terms of Address On Names and Terms of Address
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Cite
Extract
On Language
Bahasa Indonesia is a modified version of Malay, the native language of the coastal populations of parts of Sumatra, Borneo, and the Malay Peninsula. Malay also served as a maritime lingua franca throughout the region, both before and during the period of Dutch colonial rule. However, it was not until the post–World War II proclamation of national independence that bahasa Indonesia gained much purchase beyond the multiethnic cities and ports of the archipelago. Only in the last decades have mass literacy, the expansion of state bureaucracy, and a greatly enlarged media footprint made the notion of Indonesian as a common national language more than an aspiration. In the 1990s, when most of these interviews were conducted, my informants were likely to be more comfortable speaking cakap (bahasa) Karo or else a hybrid combination of Karo and Indonesian.
The Karo language is one of a group of related, though more or less mutually unintelligible, languages of the Sumatran uplands classified as “Batak.” Karo is lexically closer to Malay than are the other Batak languages, though these are mutually unintelligible as well. They share a basic syntactic structure and some cognate words, which do not always coincide semantically. My informants regularly moved back and forth between Karo and vernacular Indonesian. Except where it seemed especially relevant to the content or context of the story, I have not indicated such code switching in the translated text. While it might be linguistically illuminating to explore this in more detail, I felt that fully notating interviews in this way would detract from the sense—and the artistry—of my informants’ accounts. Where necessary, I have inserted bracketed notations to indicate the language being used, as for example bapa [K., father] or bapak [I., father, sir]. In translated sources, both written and oral, words that are foreign to the language of the original are italicized, as in the following statement, in which the speaker switched back and forth between English and Indonesian: “To be a good wife, to be a good, whatever, member of society.” Similarly, I use italics to indicate song lyrics and poetry embedded in my text.
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