Abstract: Indonesian developed from a language of empire into an “anonymous” language of state now spoken by millions in the absence of a native-speaking ethno-national community. I compare the ways standard Indonesian is being assimilated to native habits of speech with ongoing changes in demoticized languages in Western Europe. I also compare Indonesian with global English to show how both, as lingua francas, are complementary resources for Indonesians’ vernacular engagements with each other and topical engagements with national and global modernity.

Résumé : D’abord langue d’empire, l’indonésien est devenu une langue d’État “anonyme”, parlée aujourd’hui par des millions de personnes en l’absence d’une communauté ethno-nationale de locuteurs natifs. Je compare la manière dont l’indonésien standard est en train d’être intégré dans les pratiques langagières des Indonésiens avec les changements en cours dans les langues démoticisées d’Europe occidentale. Je compare également l’indonésien à l’anglais global pour montrer comment les deux langues, en tant que lingua franca, sont des ressources complémentaires pour les échanges quotidiens des Indonésiens entre eux et pour leurs implications actuelles dans la modernité nationale et globale.

Keywords: Standard Indonesian. Lingua francas. Global English. Colonization. Literacy. Globalization.

Mots-clés: Indonésien standard. Lingua franca. Anglais global. Colonisation. Litéracie. Globalisation.

Introduction

Under colonial regimes, the work of alphabetizing strange languages was guided by more than empirical ends; it provided “vectors of literacy” that enabled projects of education, conversion, and exploitation. Alternatively, challenges of language difference could be dealt with in a “top-down” manner by enabling selected colonial subjects to gain competences in their rulers’ languages. However fluent they might become—in French, Spanish, English, German, Portuguese, Italian—their non-native abilities could be judged deficient relative to those of their native-speaking superiors. Language pedagogies in this way enabled mutual intelligibility but also produced linguistic marks of what were understood to be racial differences among groups rather than biographical differences among individuals.

These latter pedagogies have legacies in postcolonial nations where European languages endure as “neutral” means of communication among native speakers of different endogenous languages. They have value as means for promoting “linguistic homogeneity [that can be] associated with modernization and Westernization.”