As this book has developed, I have found myself addressing two different audiences: “area specialists” on one hand, and anthropological linguists on the other. Each imagined readership was focal for one of two earlier works which I wrote about Javanese, and both together have shaped this work. One way to provide a sense of what might be in this book for both, then, is to sketch its relation to its two predecessors.

Those two previous works were much more narrowly focused: on Javanese to the exclusion of Indonesian, and on use in tightly knit elite circles to the exclusion of the vast majority of Javanese. One could leave either book with little sense that the elites described in them are bilingual, as are millions of their coethnics; that they speak in ways significantly different from those found in other Javanese communities; that the Javanese part of Indonesia is being massively transformed by national development and a saturating, authoritarian state. This book represents an effort to redress these points of neglect comprehensively but also fairly concisely.

I wrote one monograph (Language and social change in Java: linguistic reflexes of modernization in a traditional royal polity, Ohio University Monographs in International Studies, 1985) for area specialists, aiming to diagnose some fairly broad dimensions of social change from some fairly narrow aspects of Javanese usage since the turn of the century.